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Maybe Cuba Should Have Kept Those Soviet Nukes

• April 3, 2016

• 3,200 Words

• 9 Comments

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The Nuclear Security Summit in Washington is reminds us that President Obama won his Nobel Peace Prize in large part because of his stated intentions concerning nuclear non-proliferation.

The two most recent achievements in US counterproliferation (Libya) and non-proliferation (Iran) have been tarnished by the destruction of Libya as a counter-proliferation example for North Korea by the deposition and murder of a WMD-bereft Muammar Qaddafi; the US inability to follow through on President Obama’s ambitions to bring Israel into the NPT fold as a self-acknowledged nuclear weapons power; and by US acquiescence to brutal Saudi Arabia-led rollback operations against Shia forces in Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain as compensation for US-Iran rapprochement.

In contrast to most sane Americans, I am not an enthusiast for the NPT-enforced oligopoly of a few nuclear states. I think it distorts foreign policy, particularly American foreign policy, which is keyed to the idea of leveraging the US “nuclear umbrella” to establish the United States as the indispensable security power everywhere and anywhere.

In Asia and the Middle East, beyond a continual need to validate its credentials as the biggest bully on the block, the US is trapped into reacting and overreacting to inhibit adversaries and allies alike from doing the obvious: acquiring a nice, neat, powerful, and not-too-expensive nuclear deterrent as an alternative to US dominance of their security regimes.

The United States commentariat is publicly appalled at Trump’s casual comments about South Korea and Japan going nuclear. Me, not so much. I think everybody would behave better if their neighbors had nukes. And the United States would not have so big an incentive to militarize and escalate local frictions to create a plausible role for Uncle Sam and his magic nuclear umbrella.

In other words, in a world in which the US continually maintains and improves its nuclear arsenal while inhibiting the emergence of counterbalancing deterrence—and at the same time refusing to renounce nuclear first strike—maybe the big nuclear danger is trying to keep the nukes out instead of letting the nukes in.

Recall the immortal Casey Stengel debunking the canard that sex before a game was bad for ballplayers:

Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional baseball player. It’s staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.

So, what’s more destabilizing? Proliferation, or US-led anti-proliferation? Discuss!

The one nuclear proliferation crisis everybody likes to cite to illustrate the benefits of anti-proliferation is Cuba 1962, when America’s Best and Brightest under Jack Kennedy stared down Nikita Khrushchev and his attempt to position strategic nuclear weapons in Cuba.

Let’s look at it another way: as the time the Soviet Union tried to beat (or at least match) the US at its own global nuclear hegemon strategy and failed miserably (fundamental contradictions need a good deal of experience, skill, strength, and luck to keep papered over, none of which Khrushchev had); a cautionary tale that allies and proxies don’t rate quite the same nuclear umbrella as the hegemon’s homeland (Japan and South Korea take note); and anti-proliferation is expensive, difficult, dangerous, and involves plenty of knock-on consequences (North Korea, of course).

Revisionist history a.k.a. facts have as usual removed some of the good v. evil gloss slathered on the US by Kennedy hagiographers to reveal the political calculations underlying the confrontation.

It has emerged that Khrushchev was waaaaaaaay on the wrong end of the notorious missile gap, contrary to Kennedy’s claims during the 1960 election, with major shortfalls in operational ICBMs and no strategic submarine capabilities and, indeed, with only 300 strategic nuclear devices overall compared to 1500 for the US. Soviet strategists were appalled by the introduction of US Jupiter nuclear-tipped missiles into Turkey and Italy and justifiably anxious about the prospect of a pre-emptive US strike.

Kennedy understood that standing up to the Soviets over Cuba–antiproliferating–was more a matter of US (and his) credibility and a reflection of US determination over Berlin than an issue of US national security. From the beginning of the crisis, his advisors are unambiguous in their analysis that the missiles in Cuba, when operational, would not effect the strategic balance.

Missiles in Cuba were intended by Khrushchev as a) a stabilizing strategic riposte to the US missiles in Italy and Turkey and b) a neat way to succor Cuba and bind it into a Soviet alliance by deterring a widely expected US “regime change” style invasion.

Recently, the tape recordings of the Oval Office discussions during the crisis were declassified and, according to Benjamin Schwartz in The Atlantic, yielded this priceless nugget:

On the first day of the crisis, October 16, when pondering Khrushchev’s motives for sending the missiles to Cuba, Kennedy made what must be one of the most staggeringly absentminded (or sarcastic) observations in the annals of American national-security policy: “Why does he put these in there, though? … It’s just as if we suddenly began to put a major number of MRBMs [medium-range ballistic missiles] in Turkey. Now that’d be goddamned dangerous, I would think.” McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, immediately pointed out: “Well we did it, Mr. President.”

As for regime change, Soviet expectations were spot on; after the Bay of Pigs debacle the Pentagon was busy with Operation Mongoose planning for Castro’s overthrow. Declassified documents reveal that the US would, as usual, take the high ground by invading only in response to a Cuban outrage, albeit one manufactured by the CIA. One scenario, thanks to an anonymous writer with a strong historical understanding of what had worked in US-Cuban relations:

A “Remember the Maine” incident could be arranged in several forms:

1. We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.

The most interesting element of denuclearizing Cuba is that the United States didn’t think that the Soviet Union had any operational nuclear weapons capability in Cuba when it decided to go public and issue the ultimatum to Khrushchev.

In a piece I wrote about dead horses in Soviet Ukraine (one of my favorite pieces about a pivotal event in Ukrainian history—must read!) I remarked in passing on the assertion by Victor Marchetti, a CIA whistleblower perhaps little remembered today, but a big deal in the last century:

Marchetti, by the way, claims to have been intimately involved in the intelligence aspects of the Cuban crisis. He alleges that President Kennedy was well aware that the missiles in Cuba were still lacking their warheads and therefore posed no threat to the United States. Nevertheless, Kennedy and his hagiographers, perhaps in order to provide America’s youth with sufficient pretext for a frantic pre-apocalypse f*ckfest, have skated over this aspect of the crisis.

According to Marchetti:

[We didn’t] come as close to war as many think, because Khruschev knew he was caught. His missiles weren’t armed, and he hadn’t the troops to protect them. Kennedy knew this, so he was able to say: “take them out.” And Khruschev had to say yes.

Well, at the time Marchetti wrote that in 2001, the USSR had met its demise, rehashing the Cuban Missile Crisis had become a cottage industry and occasion for mutual backpatting by Russian and US national security types who had saved the world, at least certain paleskinned bits of the Northern Hemisphere, from destruction…

…and it was pretty categorically stated that Cuba was loaded to the gunwales with nuclear weapons in October 1962, when the crisis started…

…and Marchetti was defending his initial, less alarmist assessments and dismissing the subsequent revelations as nefarious tag-team U.S.-Russian Federation disinfo…

…so post-1989 revelations do have to be parsed carefully since the Cuban missile crisis is apparently still a useful text for geopolitical jockeying between Russia and the United States…

…but emerging documents and memoirs pretty convincingly support the latter assessments.

162 gadgets is the number bandied about, a mixture of strategic warheads for the medium and intermediate range missiles targeting the US, and 92 tactical nuclear devices, especially cruise and short range missiles but also including a pair of nuclear mines.

And as for Khrushchev “not having the troops”, there were allegedly forty thousand Soviet troops in Cuba, not the few thousand estimated by Marchetti and the CIA, infiltrated together with shiploads of military equipment under the noses of the CIA and including infantry, anti-aircraft, and other defensive units to protect the core strategic nuclear force.

Soviet forces were commanded by officers whose concept of operational routine was the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany, had control over those tactical nuclear weapons, and had authority to use them if the U.S. invaded and communications with Moscow were severed. Plenty of material, in other words, to turn Cuba into a major battlefield, starting with the U.S. base at Guantanamo as a focus of Soviet attentions.

Here’s a photo of the general in charge of Soviet forces in Cuba, Issa Pliyev, wearing the “volunteer” civilian garb he detested, standing with Castro, who is wearing the rarely-seen clunky glasses that, apparently, he detested)…

…and here’s General Pliyev in his full military fig as veteran of Stalingrad, two time Hero of the Soviet Union, seven time Order of Lenin, Hero of the Mongolian People’s Republic, Member, French Legion of Honor, etc. etc.

However, Marchetti is, in terms of American perceptions at the time, correct and, in terms of Soviet strategic capabilities, apparently operationally on point.

According to the record, even after a U2 flight yielded unambiguous photographic evidence that, indeed, the Soviets had established intermediate and medium-range missile launch facilities in Cuba (built under a crash program involving the labor of hundreds of thousands of Cubans), the CIA didn’t know for sure that the warheads had arrived in Cuba.

Indeed, the photos reveal something that looks more like construction sites than comfy bases of mass destruction (the Soviets apparently cloned their homeland missile facilities in Cuba, making photo analysis of the nature and progress of the projects a bit easier), supporting the inference that the warheads were not yet on site and integrated with the missiles. The CIA conclusion appears to have been that the warheads weren’t there and if they were, they were off in some warehouse somewhere and the missiles were unarmed. It turns out the CIA was if not completely right, it was not completely wrong; the warheads for the strategic missiles, it transpires, were in Cuba but had not been deployed to the launchers yet.

Another indication that the strategic missiles were not operational in October 1962 is that Khrushchev was not yet prepared to formally announce their existence.

Apparently, Khrushchev planned to announce the existence of the missiles during a visit to the United States in November 1962, bringing to mind this exchange from Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove:

Dr. Strangelove: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret! Why didn’t you tell the world, EH?

—Ambassador de Sadesky: It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.

As for the tactical nuclear weapons, McNamara states that his knees wobbled when he was told about them at a thirtieth anniversary get-together in 1992 between the US, Russia, and Cuba. However, this was apparently not the first he had heard of them.

According to the Kennedy tapes, by October 29, 1962 it was known thanks to low altitude surveillance that there were nuclear capable Soviet tactical missiles on Cuba, and US military commanders were asking for permission to use tactical nuclear weapons in the planned invasion: McNamara himself refused. I’m guessing McNamara chose to assume (erroneously) the missiles were not nuclear tipped and this was the version presented to Kennedy.

Therefore, President Kennedy had the certain luxury of gaming his Cuba scenarios on the assumption that the confrontation would play out within the context of a potential direct nuclear exchange between the US and Russian homelands, and that the risk of losing the aspirational but as-yet non-operational Soviet installations in Cuba would perhaps not justify nuclear Armageddon in Khrushchev’s eyes.

The consensus opinion in Washington in October 1962—buttressed by the reports cited by Marchetti that the warheads had probably not arrived and there weren’t a lot of Soviet troops on the island–was to launch massive airstrikes followed by invasion to take out the missiles (and also, though it’s not much discussed in the official hagiography, deal with that pesky Castro problem once and for all in a geostrategic twofer). However, according to McNamara, Kennedy was swayed to go for the quarantine + ultimatum with airstrikes + invasion to follow option instead by the general in charge of U.S. Tactical Air Command, who cautioned that maybe a nuclear-armed missile might survive the massive U.S. strike to hit the United States.

In other words, the group opinion was 99% sure everything would go great, but Kennedy wanted 100%.

If the group opinion had prevailed and the US had invaded Cuba and been surprised by 40,000 nuclear-armed Soviet troops, things would have gone south in a hurry (together with McNamara’s knees and career). Which is why expert opinion has started to tilt away from “masterful statesmanship” toward the “lucky accident” interpretation of the crisis.

As it transpired, the most immediate nuclear risk during the crisis didn’t even involve the weapons on Cuba. It was created by the US Navy enthusiastically depth charging a Soviet sub nearing Cuba that was armed with a nuclear torpedo. Unaware that the USN was dropping undercharged “we want you to surface and identify yourself” ashcans and not “we want to sink you” depth bombs and worried that his vessel was about to be destroyed, the Soviet captain decided to dish out his 10-kiloton nuclear torpedo and go down in a blaze of glory. Fortunately, the launch was vetoed by his flotilla commander, who happened to be on the boat. The sub, happily, survived, as did significant swaths of the Soviet Union and US.

Khrushchev eventually obliged Kennedy, climbing down in a nice superpower-to-superpower way, receiving in return a pledge that the United States would not invade Cuba (a pledge honored somewhat in the breach) and a sub voce US undertaking to remove soon-to-be-obsolete Jupiter missiles from Turkey and maybe Italy (which were subsequently replaced by invulnerable sub-based Polaris missiles).

And that, of course, did not oblige Fidel Castro, who regards Khrushchev as an ass and a wimp.

An ass, because instead of declaring to Kennedy that the missiles were a deterrent and an sovereign Soviet security interest covered by the USSR’s nuclear force when a U2 flight detected initial signs of missile facility construction in August 1962, Khrushchev fudged and called them defensive (with the apparent mental reservation that “defensive” meant “offensive weapons that defend Cuba by virtue of their deterrent function”). This put the Soviet foreign policy establishment on the wrong foot in vigorously and credibly defending the initiative when it turned out in October that there were four dozen strategic missiles in the package capable of reaching most of the continental United States.

And wimp, because Khrushchev backed down in October 1962 and threw Cuba under the bus. Cuba under Castro had irrevocably burned its bridges to the United States by hosting the missiles, and was ready to do that socialist shoulder-to-shoulder thing and risk US annihilation in an attack if the USSR was ready to take out the United States in retaliation. But not to be. Khrushchev caved to the US and removed all the nukes, not just the strategic weapons he had promised Kennedy to remove, but also the tactical nuclear weapons he had promised Castro in the initial agreement would eventually be delivered to Cuban control—and Washington didn’t even know about.*

So instead of getting a powerful, nuke-based alliance with the USSR that would give Castro bargaining leverage against US security and economic coercion—and maybe diplomatic recognition, who knows? The US had extended the courtesy to a number of Soviet proxies with considerably less national legitimacy than Cuba– Cuba was left as a lonely piñata twisting in the wind while the US took whacks at it for over 50 years. President Obama marked the continuation, rather than conclusion, of the effort by going to Cuba for a triumphal visit that was interpreted, especially in the United States, as receiving the Castros’ surrender to the forces of US democracy and capitalism, notwithstanding Raul Castro’s effort to literally spin Obama’s flaccid wrist into a display of transnational popular solidarity.

Here’s how those socialist photops are supposed to look, by the way.

For the Soviet Union, a dismal botch that helped cost Khrushchev his job and, coming on the heels of the China debacle, pretty much put paid to Soviet overseas nuclear junketeering.

While the Soviet Union was out of the proliferation game, the US went all in on nukes as a geostrategic asset, not only maintaining its nuclear edge through technological improvements and integrating nuclear weapons into its security architecture in Asia as well as Europe, but also by antiproliferating, by seeking to deny new aspirants, allies as well as adversaries, entry to the club through suasion, sanctions, and even war.

In an interesting way, the US is now somewhat recapitulating the Soviet endgame in Cuba, with elements in Japan and the Republic of Korea becoming more vocal about their desire to control their own nuclear destinies rather than rely on the United States, thereby challenging the US nuclear weapons monopoly and the Asian security architecture which it underpins.

The forces advocating for nuclear proliferation are many; the US, while not standing alone as an anti-proliferater, is perhaps alone in its depth of conviction, interest, and determination. This creates challenges for President Obama as he tries to universalize the internationalized NPT legal regime and wean the United States from unilateral anti-proliferation and its occasional resort to violations of sovereignty to achieve its objectives.**

What about Cuba? What would have happened if the USSR, instead of putting its own nukes on Cuba, had just given Cuba some nukes? Or, in a strikingly plausible scenario, let Castro keep the tactical nukes after the Soviets withdrew? How would US relations with Cuba and the rest of Latin America evolved?

Looking at the cavalcade of instability in places like Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Honduras, and Guatemala engendered by the successful US rollback of socialism after Khrushchev bugged out, Latin America would certainly have been different if Cuba had nukes…and maybe not worse off.

But that’s a possibility the US, for obvious reasons, has no interest in exploring.

*The report that Khrushchev had decided to let Castro keep the nukes post-crisis, but his envoy, Deputy Prime Minister Anastas Mikoyan,evaluated that Castro (admittedly at that time 32 years old, emotionally vigorous, and under tremendous stress) was too headstrong & irrational, & decided on his own initiative to negotiate their withdrawal is, by the way, false. Mikoyan determined that Khrushchev’s serial mismanagement of the crisis had alienated Castro to the degree that effective co-management of the weapons was impossible. Castro, in desperation, was prepared to inform the world through the UN that, despite the Soviet withdrawal, Cuba still had the nukes and an effective deterrent against US invasion. The decision to notify Castro the weapons were being pulled from Cuba was made in consultation with the Soviet Party Presidium.

**There was no basis under international law for the unilateral US blockade of Cuba in 1962. The legal recourse for the US would have been to obtain a 2/3 vote from the Organization of American States authorizing a blockade against a member state, something that the US wasn’t willing to wait for. The legal end-around was to call it a “quarantine”.

(Reprinted from China Matters by permission of author or representative)

• Category: History • Tags: Cuba, Cuban Missile Crisis, Nuclear Weapons

South China Sea Trifecta

Peter Lee

• March 22, 2016

• 500 Words

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For a guy who’s sick of the whole South China Sea imbroglio, I sure write about it a lot.

I have a piece up at The Asia-Pacific Journal/Japan Focus: China Not Leaving the “South China Sea”. It updates the PRC strategic move to an island based posture in anticipation of an unfavorable ruling on the UNCLOS arbitration.

And a piece at China Matters, America’s South China Sea Fail, which addresses the shortcomings of the US pushing the territorial sea/anti Nine Dash Line gambit in the SCS. I regard the US SCS policy as ill-conceived and ineffective, therefore eliciting a lot of lip service and a lot less genuine buy in from countries in the region. In this context, I take a look at Kurt Campbell’s patty-cake with David Ignatius as an effort to logroll an also less-than-enthusiastic President Obama to escalate a Clinton-legacy/Pentagon-adored SCS policy that otherwise is boldly going nowhere.

And a piece at Asia Times on what I find to be an interesting “dog that did bark” (to mangle Sherlock Holmes): the spasm of panic that the UNCLOS ruling will not come down soon enough to box in the various candidates in the Philippines presidential election in early May. It’s exclusive at Asia Times, titled Philippine Election Question Marks Sow Panic in the South China Sea. The specter of the PRC reclaiming the Scarborough Shoal is being evoked, possibly to stampede the arbitration commission into issuing a ruling Before It’s Too Late.

Certainly, if the PRC successfully occupies Scarborough Shoal as a territorial feature beyond the reach of UNCLOS, some people in the Philippines would question the value and wisdom of the UNCLOS route even more than they’re doing now. And it would be a move that would demand a US escalated response, both to display US might and resolve to the PRC and to persuade the Philippines they have not signed on for a policy that is not only ill-conceived, but doing immediate and concrete damage to Philippine interests.

United States strategists never concerned themselves overmuch with flaws in the South China Sea endgame or possible shortfalls in local support, in my opinion. Discord with the PRC of any kind was productive, since it would polarize the region and push China’s neighbors into closer relations with the United States. And the casual assumption concerning US influence in Asia is that the military relationships and the pro-American milsec forces they foster have enough clout to shoulder aside the China doves.

However, as the choices become harder, the options less palatable, and the flaws in the U.S. approach become more evident, more active and cruder measures will have to be implemented in order to gut local opposition to lining up with the United States against the PRC.

I think that overt local China-hawk political campaigning in tag-team with the Pentagon is becoming a fact of life in the Philippines and Australia. And I think more extreme efforts to invoke a sense of regional crisis to force local governments off the fence and sign on for things like joint FON patrols, open statements against the PRC in SCS etc. will become the key destabilizing issue in the SCS in the upcoming period.

(Reprinted from China Matters by permission of author or representative)

• Category: Foreign Policy • Tags: China, South China Sea

America's South China Sea Fail

Stupid Sh*t: US Failure, Denial, and Escalation in the South China Sea

Peter Lee

• March 19, 2016

• 2,100 Words

• 68 Comments

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By most metrics the US campaign to deter and modify PRC behavior in the South China Sea has been a colossal bust.

The US “Freedom of Navigation” initiative for the South China Sea is, to put it bluntly, completely bogus. The PRC has no interest in impeding the movement of ships in the South China Sea and the US Navy, when it goes into the region to engage in its ostensibly confrontational high risk FONOPs, is simply pushing against Jell-O. The PLAN stays out of the way and lets them sail around.

In early March, the United States sailed a carrier battle group through the South China Sea and flew 226 sorties. Chinese response: Meh.

The second leg of the US maritime “lawfare” strategy, the Philippine arbitration gambit—using arbitration under the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea a.k.a. UNCLOS to repudiate the PRC “Nine-Dash-Line” claim to maritime sovereignty over the South China Sea–is probably not going to yield any stunning victories. China has categorically announced it will ignore the ruling, UNCLOS has no enforcement mechanism and, even if the US wanted to step up and do the job on UNCLOS’ behalf, it’s not even a signatory to UNCLOS. Awkward.

And the PRC has funneled billions it might have spent elsewhere into securing its position as the dominant national presence across large swaths of the South China Sea through island building, island development, and expansion of its coast guard fleet.

It should have been realized from the beginning that the US maritime gambit in the South China Sea—conceived by Kurt Campbell, indefatigably promoted by Hillary Clinton as the cornerstone of her “screw the Chinese” excuse me, “smart power in Asia” policy and, for obvious reasons, passionately adored by the United States Navy—was headed for failure.

The PRC had never treated the South China Sea as exclusive territory. Free military and civilian air and sea traffic through the region was always a PRC national priority given the relative weakness of its own navy and air force. For the last thirty years, the PRC’s precarious island/atoll/outpost claims had coexisted with the precarious island/atoll/outpost claims of the Philippines, Vietnam, and Taiwan without military clashes.

Friction was largely confined to resource exploitation: hydrocarbon reserves and fishing operations, with the PRC behaving rather d*ckishly either to exploit these opportunities exclusively or to strongarm its weaker neighbors into cooperation on terms favorable to the PRC.

When Vietnam and the Philippines moved to bring their territorial waters/EEZ claims in line with UNCLOS, theoretically the PRC resource claims were at risk: neighboring countries’ EEZ claims could chew up most of the South China Sea, leaving the PRC shut out of potentially lucrative oil, gas, and fishing plays.

Practically, as opposed to theoretically, is another matter.

The key to the South China Sea has never been its waters. It’s the islands, the atolls, the shoals, the Low Tide Elevations (LTEs). I, for one, already saw signs of the PRC considering migration to a UNCLOS-derived if not compliant island sovereignty basis for its South China Sea claims a few years back.

The PRC can retreat to its hodgepodge of island, atoll, and LTE holdings, assert territorial sea and EEZ claims around them, and put itself in a position in which it could maliciously complicate the enjoyment of the Philippines and Vietnam of their EEZ privileges if and when the Nine-Dash-Line was invalidated.

And the US has got nuttin’ for that. The US doesn’t take positions on sovereignty of landmasses. It hasn’t even acknowledged Japanese sovereignty over the Senkakus/Daioyutai Islands, even as it places them under the aegis of the US-Japan Security Treaty as Japanese holdings to be protected against Chinese attack. The US advocates for the status quo. All it can do is issue non-binding calls for moratoriums on island-related stuff–which are largely ignored.

The Chinese realizes this, and have rooted their position in the South China Sea on digging in on the islands etc. they already occupy.

Indeed, ever since the SCS issue has hotted up, PRC official rhetoric has keyed on“territorial sovereignty” not “maritime sovereignty”. And, on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress this year, Foreign Minister Wang Yi redrew the line:

The Nansha Islands are China’s integral territory. Every Chinese has an obligation to defend them. China has not and will not make any new territorial claims.

…

China was the first country to discover, name, develop and administer the South China Sea islands. Our ancestors lived and worked there for generations, so we know and love the place more than anyone else. And more than anyone else, we want to uphold peace, stability and freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.

…

History will prove who is a mere visitor and who is the real host.

Wang’s asperity in the last line is perhaps attributable to the fact that, while the US foreign policy commentariat expends much righteous spittle the vital need for America to drive events in the South China Sea, it apparently knows and understands little about the actual issues involved. The most recent illustration was the empty hubbub over the surface-to-air missiles on Woody Island, which the US foreign policy/media combine maliciously or ignorantly conflated into a repudiation of Xi Jinping’s “pledge” not to militarize the Spratly Islands–500 miles away.

Looks small on a map, folks, but it’s a big sea. Would cover most of western Europe.

If anything, the Philippine arbitration challenge to the Nine-Dash-Line served only to intensify the PRC island project. Instead of engaging in endless jaw-jaw with Manila, the PRC went overtly and defiantly unilateral: it has physically grown its islands, poured resources into their development to make the territorial claims appear irrevocable, and integrated them into its national infrastructure without reference to the interests or sensibilities of the Philippines.

And it has placed itself in a position to claim, unilaterally, EEZs around those faux islands, as Japan did with its notorious Okinotoroshima boondoggle, a 200 nautical mile EEZ encircling two uninhabitable, not long for above water existence eroding rocks the size of a couple of station wagons—until the Japanese government secured them with an investment of over half a billion dollars.

If the PRC exacts the ultimate price tag for the Philippine insistence on pursuing arbitration—by geo-engineering the Scarborough Shoal that it currently occupies into a permanent PRC territorial presence (PRC ships currently control maritime access to the fishing grounds)—the Philippine government may begin to question the wisdom of poking a finger in the PRC’s eye by going for arbitration (and, I suspect, by acceding to US sabotage of Philippine bilateral negotiations with the PRC over the shoal in 2012).

It was expected from the beginning that the PRC would never honor the result of the arbitration commission. Now the implications—including the prospect of prolonged economic estrangement between the PRC and the Philippines– are starting to sink in.

China containment strategists are perhaps taking another look at the Aegean Sea dispute as a precedent for the South China Sea. It’s been a frozen conflict between Turkey and Greece for the last 30 years. Nobody touches the islands; nobody interferes with navigation; nobody cares. The PRC would be happy with such an outcome, even if it involves the US Navy sailing around every few weeks on another FONOP.

Perhaps that is why the pro-arbitration forces led by Supreme Court Associate Justice and architect of the Philippine case, Antonio Carpio, are anxiously calling for all candidates for the Philippine presidency to declare their undying loyalty to the arbitration approach before the elections even happen, for fear that a new president may decide to ditch insistence that the PRC adhere to the arbitration outcome in favor of some kind of bilateral workout.

To render assistance, US advocates of the pivot have overtly stuck their fingers in the Philippine political pie.

Ground zero for the SCS strategy in Washington is the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I can’t say its staked its reputation on the success of the South China Sea strategy (if a US geostrategic gambit fails, it’s inevitably not the fault of the think tank that conceived and promoted it), but for CSIS it’s spelled C$I$ if you get my drift: money and clout.

Confirming the hand-in-glove relationship between Philippine and US champions of the arbitration process, CSIS’s Asian Maritime Transparency Initiative echoed Carpio’s declaration by issuing a desperate (and, given the supposedly apolitical character of UNCLOS proceedings) rather awkward call for the arbitration panel to hand down its ruling during Aquino’s presidency so whoever succeeds him after the May elections would have to eat the cake that had already been baked:

The timing of the decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague on the Philippines’ case against China’s nine-dash-line claims has critical geopolitical implications for Asia’s security. Specifically, a decision delivered well before the Philippine presidential election this May would allow the administration of President Benigno Aquino to respond strategically and with continuity, whatever the outcome

…

A decision delivered after May would in effect roll the dice by putting a new leadership team in Manila in charge of managing the court’s determination.

If the decision is released and a new administration ignores it to pursue the bilateral negotiations that China has demanded all along, it decreases the incentive for other small nations to turn to international law and arbitration. If the Philippines didn’t get anything out of pursuing its case, why should Vietnam or Malaysia follow in the future?

Why indeed?

Anxiety in US pivot-land was further expressed in a David Ignatius op-ed in the Washington Post. It employed the classic “that guy over there is responsible for the problems with my strategy” ploy in faithfully transcribing pivot-pappy Kurt Campbell’s spin on why his South China Sea had accelerated instead of deterred PRC adventurism and we’re headed for “a dangerous showdown”:

What makes this dispute so explosive is that it pits an American president who needs to affirm his credibility as a strong leader against a risk-taking Chinese president who has shown disregard for U.S. military power and who faces potent political enemies at home.

“This isn’t Pearl Harbor, but if people on all sides aren’t careful, it could be ‘The Guns of August,’ ” says Kurt Campbell, former assistant secretary of state for Asia, referring to the chain of miscalculations that led to World War I. The administration, he says, is facing “another red line moment where it has to figure out how to carry through on past warnings.”

“You don’t want the Chinese to lose face,” says Campbell. “But you want their leadership to understand that if they continue along this path, they risk spiraling the relationship into a very negative place.”

As can be seen, the “other guy” is not just Xi Jinping, who refused to bow before the majesty of the pivot er, excuse me, rebalancing to Asia. It’s Barack Obama, whose reservations about the utility of FONOPs is a byword in Washington, and whose skepticism concerning Clinton-derived foreign policy was memorably characterized as “who exactly is in the stupid sh*t caucus? Who’s in favor of doing stupid sh*t?”.

Well…

The strategy hasn’t delivered. Do we admit the strategy isn’t delivering? No, we blame the other guys and, of course, try to escalate ourselves out of our embarrassment. And we put the onus on the current US president for being a wimp if he doesn’t go along. And pin our hopes on the incoming president (Hillary Clinton, it looks like), who is irrevocably committed to pursuing the confrontational policy (since she is its public face and terminally mistrusted by the PRC as a result), to keep the ball rolling.

Campbell’s convo with Ignatius actually looks like an interesting US recapitulation of the Philippine move to push escalation, encourage China hawks, sideline the skeptics, and lock in the policy pre-emptively to sidetrack growing doubts that might complicate transition into a new administration. Great minds think alike, I guess (and lesser minds club together to connive at mutually beneficial logrolling).

And the possibility that the PRC will island-build the Scarborough Shoal and occupy it—thereby removing it from the maritime realm and into the safe haven of an irresolvable territorial dispute—has apparently given Kurt Campbell the willies.

My favorite line from the Ignatius piece was:

[T]he White House has an intense interagency planning process underway to prepare for the looming confrontation. Options include an aggressive tit-for-tat strategy, in which the United States would help countries such as the Philippines and Vietnam build artificial islands of their own in disputed waters.

I would like to think President Obama turned to Campbell (or whatever pivot-friendly worthy who contributed this brainwave) and said, “So we should have been building islands all along? Really? Like the Chinese? So what we’ve been doing for the last five years, the whole maritime strategy with the Navy, the FONOPs, the UNCLOS? Wait, don’t tell me. IT WAS STUPID SH*T!”

(Reprinted from China Matters by permission of author or representative)

• Category: Foreign Policy • Tags: China, Kurt Campbell, South China Sea

A Revolution in Strategy: US Shifts to Pre-emptive Posture for Asia

Peter Lee

• March 15, 2016

• 900 Words

• 3 Comments

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I have a piece up at Asia Times—only at Asia Times! Exclusive!—‘Beheading’ Kim: Pre-emptive Strikes are Back and Headed for China, on the implications of the leaked US decapitation strategy for North Korea.

In my opinion a) the US is testdriving an eventual pre-emption posture for the PRC in North Korea and b) it locks the US and its adversaries into an escalating threat dynamic that, for the United States is more feature than bug.

It’s a revolutionary development in U.S. strategy, in my opinion, reflecting an awareness that the PRC has been successful in evading U.S. deterrent posturing, so something bigger, dumber, and more dangerous is needed.

An article at by William Arkin at Vice News provides some more details on the North Korea contingency plans and, in the process, reveals a certain amount of confusion about the pre-emptive character of the decapitation strategy and what it means:

Since 2005, according to an intelligence source who spoke on background, the number of indication and warning reports on North Korea has increased from 60 a day to 600. “There isn’t a mouse that scurries in the DMZ without note,” the analyst claims. The end product, US military insiders think, is 100 percent alert capability in the event of a North Korean attack — a somewhat confusing concept considering an alert would demand action before an attack.

In other words, “decapitate on alert”, with the U.S. military claiming the ability to predict “100%” that the North Koreans are going to attack, and establishing the justification for launching a pre-emptive “decapitation” strike on that basis.

Wonder if there’s an algorithm covering Aggressive Mouse Movements in the DMZ. Attack!

It should be pointed out how additional surveillance factors provide more reasons for attack. Something to think about when considering the motivations and significance for the US push to deploy THAAD—with its 1000 mile look-in into PRC airspace—into South Korea.

Anybody who believes that the U.S. military genuinely possesses 100% omniscience and, indeed, would never launch a pre-emptive attack as a matter of convenience and with less than 100% assurance an attack was actually coming, please form a line to the left for our presentation on our revolutionary Brooklyn Bridge timeshare.

The rest of us, please reflect on the fact that William Arkin, who was privileged with a backgrounder on the strategy, finds it “somewhat confusing” i.e. apparently has some difficulty in wrapping his mind around the fact that the United States has declared the ability to unilaterally and secretly define an imminent threat and launch a pre-emptive attack on that basis.

Switching from “deterrence” to “pre-emption” is a revolutionary step. It’s also self-escalating, since the response to “pre-emption on alert” for the DPRK (and also the PRC) is to switch to “Launch on Warning” for their strategic arsenals. And, of course, when an adversary switches to LOW, the case for “pre-emption on alert” is automatically strengthened.

Arkin does, at least, have an awareness of what the pre-emptive doctrine implies for “use it or lose it” military planners:

As irrational as the North is portrayed in the West, its actions aren’t totally without reason. Its military statement in response to this year’s exercises accused the US and the South of rehearsing a “decapitation operation” that would produce the “collapse of the [North Korean] system.”

Pyongyang warns that North Korea will strike out if the regime detects the “slightest” effort to target what it called “the supreme nerve center.” And yet that targeting is already going on, the insane tyranny of sensible but self-defeating actions on both sides to preserve the peace. The South is threatened, the North is threatened, and the two sides, convinced they are right, ratchet up preparedness to a point where conflict becomes more and more likely.

One might draw the implication that an officially endorsed pre-emption strategy is stupid, escalating, and destabilizing.

Maybe it is, but “stupid, escalating, and destabilizing” is how the U.S. military likes it, in my opinion. The U.S. military is supremely confident of its ability to dish it out and not take it in, especially with the US homeland a few thousand miles out of harm’s way.

Same applies to China.

The U.S. military (and, I expect, much of the government and almost all of thinktankistan) wants the PRC to start thinking about a pre-emption threat, especially as the geniuses in Washington struggle to come to terms with the fact that the spectacularly misconceived South China Sea gambit is floundering as the PRC dodges confrontation with the US Navy and US deterrent forces while solidifying its strategic position in the SCS.

Time to fail upward a.k.a. escalate, in other words. If the PRC won’t challenge US military force directly, then it’s time to switch to a pre-emption narrative and freely impute PRC threats wherever and whenever we want to see them and put the PRC under threat of a pre-emptive strike no matter what they do or don’t do.

It would behoove readers with an interest in World War III and what it means to them to start looking critically at the drumbeat of US reports about PRC “escalating” & “increasing tensions” & “militarizing” in light of a US search for pretexts to strengthen justification for a pre-emptive doctrine.

Here’s a good example of the hypothetical threat boondoggle.

Civilian resistance to living under the cloud of a looming pre-emptive strike threat might complicate this strategy, but thanks to the efforts of Western journos, look forward to this issue getting obscured, misexplained, or just plain lied about, so that a massive destabilizing military doctrine can be implemented in plain sight without its implications being adequately understood.

(Reprinted from China Matters by permission of author or representative)

• Category: Foreign Policy • Tags: American Media, China, Pre-emption

Post-Obama Elites Not Ready for Prime Time

Peter Lee

• March 12, 2016

• 1,500 Words

• 11 Comments

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Just to cheer everybody up:

Thereafter, would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had died before or been born afterwards. For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the gods shall lay sore trouble upon them. But, notwithstanding, even these shall have some good mingled with their evils. And Zeus will destroy this race of mortal men also when they come to have grey hair on the temples at their birth. The father will not agree with his children, nor the children with their father, nor guest with his host, nor comrade with comrade; nor will brother be dear to brother as aforetime. Men will dishonour their parents as they grow quickly old, and will carp at them, chiding them with bitter words, hard-hearted they, not knowing the fear of the gods. They will not repay their aged parents the cost their nurture, for might shall be their right: and one man will sack another’s city. There will be no favour for the man who keeps his oath or for the just or for the good; but rather men will praise the evil-doer and his violent dealing. Strength will be right and reverence will cease to be; and the wicked will hurt the worthy man, speaking false words against him, and will swear an oath upon them. Envy, foul-mouthed, delighting in evil, with scowling face, will go along with wretched men one and all. And then Aidos and Nemesis, with their sweet forms wrapped in white robes, will go from the wide-pathed earth and forsake mankind to join the company of the deathless gods: and bitter sorrows will be left for mortal men, and there will be no help against evil.

Hesiod, Works and Days

Actually, my contention is that times are not particularly bad, and I believe the US political and social system is robust enough to weather the current storm.

What I do think is that the United States is facing a transitional crisis exacerbated by incompetent leadership. Not Obama. His successors. We’ll need an FDR. Instead we’re gonna get Fala. Woof.

US elite opinion is pretty flummoxed about the whole Donald Trump phenomenon, even though the core of his appeal seem pretty clear to me.

His campaign draws its energy from a lot of white Americans who perceive the erosion of their economic and social advantages thanks to the perennial “rich get richer” dynamic and inflection-point demographic changes, symbolized by a two-term black president. In the past, many whites expected they would have first claim on entry into the Valhalla of middle-class comfort if and when the gates were flung open. Not so much, today.

White political muscle is fading, symbolized by the fact that Ronald Reagan won the presidency handily with 56% of the white vote in 1980, while Romney got 59% of the white vote in 2012 and lost. Here’s a guesstimate that the Republicans would have to get 66% of the white vote in 2016 to win the presidential election.

The GOP leadership’s anxiety over this demographic phenomenon and its faltering attempts to move beyond its white base–symbolized by its quixotic promotion of certified Hispanobozo Mario Rubio—has, I expect, soured GOP white voters on their erstwhile political champion.

So, I feel pretty comfortable associating Trump with white anxiety shading on panic. And, since my definition of fascism is pretty strict, if idiosyncratic, I don’t worry too much about a Trump or post-Trump overtly white–nationalist movement seizing state power. Horses simply aren’t there, demographically speaking. Here’s hoping I’m right.

Interestingly, Bernie Sanders is discretely trolling this reservoir of white discontent in search of supporters interested in a more overtly economic explanation of their unhappiness, one that relies more on current economic anxiety and analysis of social inequities than nostalgia for past glories.

What particularly interests me is what this ruckus is that many middle class and lower middle class voters are interested in racism-and-socialism tinged political and economic solutions.

What does this say about the prevailing US doctrine of race-blind politics and free market economics?

Well, what I think it points to is the inherent flaws of an elite-based economic, social, and political order, flaws that are getting put under more of a microscope as the US system creeps into crisis.

Funny thing is, by conventional metrics, the US system isn’t doing so bad, jobs and economy-wise.

I think the crisis was triggered by the demographic shift, which caused a lot of whites to question their future position in American society. And that has translated into a shift from “Hey, the US economy is unfair, but it’s unfair in my favor” to “Hey, the US economy is unfair!”

And American elites, for whom the economy is always unfair in their favor, seem to have a little trouble figuring out why the American system is declined into such a clattery condition of dysfunction.

The Democratic and Republican leadership, in my opinion, drank the Kool Aid. Their rather self-serving assumption was that electoral/free market system was self-regulating and would control and channel populist dissatisfaction while the elites got on with governing the country and profiting—as their abilities and energies unambiguously merited!—from its economic opportunities.

And they’re surprised that the clockwork mechanism might need a little cleaning and winding.

Maybe it’s because they inherited this world, instead of building it.

Pro Tip: It takes more than good intentions, it takes hard ugly work to keep a nation—specifically its elites–on top.

US populism of the “savory” and “unsavory” kinds, both of which interfere with elite governance, was kept in check by a few undemocratic/non-free market factors in the last few decades.

First of all, the US got a disproportionate share of global economic growth when three major economic powers—Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union—were devastated by World War II.

Secondly, US political and economic populism were checked both by the inherent “divide and rule” racial dynamics of a post-slavery society, and by a concerted Federal attack on Communism, socialism, and radical trade unionism, black nationalism and white nationalism.

In my opinion, J. Edgar Hoover had as much to do with the making of the American Century as FDR and Eisenhower.

American “exceptionalism” is born of exceptional circumstances, opportunities, choices, and actions, not because God decided to put His/Her hand up the Masonic-leaning asses of our Founding Fathers to employ them as divine sock puppets.

I am always astounded when the United States is characterized as a “democracy”. It is a republic, openly and avowedly anti-democratic by design to forestall the populist excesses symbolized by the French Revolution. Blacks not only didn’t get the vote in the beginning; they were counted as only 3/5 of a person to balance the political power of northern and southern states. Women didn’t get the vote until the 20^th century. Even today, with a near universal adult franchise (not counting those 5.85 convicted felons disenfranchised in 2015, including an estimated 1 in 13 African American adults), the state structure, Electoral College, gerrymandering, constitutional protections etc. guarantee that the “democratic will” has to make several passes through the “republican” meatgrinder before its gooey remains emerge to become law.

The American political and social system is designed to keep elites in charge, and divide and disaggregate populist political movements. But it’s still effective control by a minority, and it takes prosperity, exceptional leaders and, I’m afraid, frequent recourse to the discourse of domestic threats and overseas wars to make the majority forget they surrendered control of their futures to “the best and brightest”.

President Obama, whom I believe possessed the highest personal caliber of any president in the last century, barely kept populist feelings in check. The bunch running for president this year doesn’t seem at all up to the task.

When people are feeling unhappy, scared, poor, and pushed around, believe their futures at risk, and the elite class is propping up obvious clowns, opportunists, and incompetents as their purported political leaders, they begin to remember that.

Elites seem to have forgotten. And by diverting, marginalizing, discounting, and demonizing populism, elites pretty much guaranteed that when it arose, it would be alien and unsettling and they wouldn’t do a very good job of understanding it, coping with it, or co-opting it.

Which is why both the Democratic and Republican parties are both under stress from two populist movements led by two personalities whose abilities to channel that populism responsibly and govern competently and effectively are, to be generous, questionable.

Elite incomprehension in the face of racist and socialist agitation—strains that have always been nascent in US society and are now resurgent—is, to me, pretty damning proof that our second-and-third generation elites are moving into the Iron Age of decline and decadence.

The Panglossian “best of all possible worlds” “set and forget” assertion that the Constitution and electoral mechanisms ensured a perpetually smoothly functioning US society is still the governing dogma of US elites.

This profound cluelessness is typified by the child-like faith that, if Trump is simply shown to be a nasty man, his support will just melt away.

But now it’s going to take more money, effort, PR, and, maybe violence to convince everybody else.

What comes after the Iron Age?

(Reprinted from China Matters by permission of author or representative)

• Category: Economics, Ideology • Tags: 2016 Election, Donald Trump

Libya: Worse Than Iraq. Sorry, Hillary

Peter Lee

• March 6, 2016

• 4,600 Words

• 49 Comments

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George W. Bush destroyed the state and army of Iraq, but it was located within a constellation of relatively powerful and capable states interested in some form of stability or control. The United States also poured massive doses of money and power into Iraq in an attempt to influence its outcomes.

However, when the US pitched in to “lead from behind” and destroy the Libyan state at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s urging, even though Libya was surrounded by relatively vulnerable, at-risk states unable or unwilling to project power beyond their borders, the U.S. refused to go “Pottery Barn”, to use Colin Powell’s analogy, and fill the power vacuum in Libya with its own forces.

The United States did worse than just walk away. In a misguided and morally and intellectually lazy (my opinion!) gambit it tried to “export” its way out of the Libyan problem by supporting the migration of destabilizing elements, i.e. the Islamist fighters who had brought down Qaddafi, to another adventure in Syria. Now, with the Syrian project faltering despite 5 years of foreign-funded Islamist insurrection, Libya has emerged as a preferred destination not only for returning Libyan fighters, but also a growing population of transnational fighters from dozens of countries.

Security analysts are quietly flummoxed about the establishment of the Islamist fighter “colony” in Libya, because after three decades of cynically exploiting Islamist fighters as a deniable asset against the Soviet Union and uncooperative secular regimes, the number of transnational Islamist fighters has roughly quintupled. Fact is, the number probably more than doubled in the last couple years alone, thanks to the competing recruitment efforts of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and ISIS in the Syria/Iraq theater.

The inability to stop the growth in foreign fighters in the old-fashioned way by killing them in various battlefields is probably behind the well-funded US interest in the seemingly bizarre, ineffectual, and rather desperate anti-recruitment propaganda/psyops/Twitter wars blanketing the Internet, as well as the announcement that Hollywood has enlisted in the “anti-ISIS” struggle.

Dealing with the transnational fighter migration to Libya is kinda tough, you know, because we destroyed the Libyan state & army, didn’t replace those power factors with our own troops, nobody else has the juice to restore order, and so the primary military forces are the Islamist militias themselves. And Libya is surrounded by shaky states that offer attractive secondary refuge/employment opportunities for Islamist militias whether or not the US/NATO campaign to restore a semblance of national authority in Libya through bombing/proxies/stern rhetoric succeeds.

This cavalier disregard for the consequences of the Libyan war indicates that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State with an army of wonk and advisors and spooks, did not grasp one of the essential lessons of the Iraq invasion and its trillion-dollar aftermath. Or she anticipated the outcome and didn’t care which, in terms of her brief to act as steward of America’s interests, is probably worse.

Heckuva job, Hillary.

But Job One is dealing with an even more important problem: the threat the Libya fiasco might pose to Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations.

In an apparent effort to help Hillary Clinton shed the signature incubus of her tenure as Secretary of State, the New York Times ran a two-parter which rather generously slotted the Libya disaster into the “we meant well” category. Secretary Clinton didn’t agree to an interview for the story but a key foreign policy advisor at the time and, I imagine, helpful surrogate for the purposes of this piece, Anne-Marie Slaughter, contributed the observation that Clinton was guilty of the sin of “getting caught trying” i.e. trying to accomplish great things but coming up short.

I have a lot of problems with this framing and the piece in general, to put it mildly. I think a good title reflecting its basic theme would be “White World’s Failed Crusade in Libya: How Silly and Shortsighted Browns Screwed Up the Nice Democracy NATO and the U.S. Tried to Give Them”. However, my main gripe is that it completely and, I suspect, intentionally disregards the context of the Libyan adventure: a disastrous U.S. alliance with the Gulf autocracies intent on a) nailing Gaddafi and b) responding to the challenge of the Arab Spring with a Sunni counterrevolution reliant on Islamist fighters instead of “boots on the ground”.

But let’s leave that question to the philosophers and consider an interesting and dire consequence of the Libyan campaign: how the US not only helped created a failed state haven for Islamist fighters but tried to export its problem to Syria and only made matters much much worse.

Amazingly, US foreign policy is still hooked on irregular Islamist fighters–to the extent of cooperating with al-Qaeda after 9/11 (please read this before judging if I’m engaging in hyperbole)– even as Islamist fighters continue to spread death and chaos around the world. I guess in think tank land it’s a problem that “we’ll get right the next time” so “let’s make sure there’s a next time”.

However, it turns out that Islamic fighters are a bit like the national debt. They’re almost impossible to retire, and the easiest solution is to roll them over into another conflict and, in the process, create more Islamic fighters.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if one reason Islamist fighters have wreaked havoc all over the Eastern Hemisphere in the last quarter century is their patrons can’t figure out any endgame for them other than shipping them off to another conflict.

Since we shrink from overtly backing these groups, we never feel obligated to address this issue, at least in public.

But it’s clear neither hosts nor patrons of jihadi fighters want them to hang around once they’ve outlived their usefulness; “reprogramming” them as docile citizens of their country of origin doesn’t work very well; and the easy solution is to kick the can down the road i.e. send the fighters off to some other convenient conflict. Saudi Arabia seems addicted to this formula and is always looking forward to a jihad opportunity for cranky militants who might otherwise target its incompetent autocracy.

And maybe not just Saudi Arabia, as this interesting perspective on how the Russian Federation may have addressed its disgruntled Dagestani problem:

Why do the intelligence services of many countries including Russia not stop people who go join IS? How did Nadir abu Khalid [a charismatic preacher tracked by the security services] get to IS?…Look at Dagestan. Before our mosques were full of people and lessons were conducted by people like Nadir…People flocked to Islam, constantly learned and the infidels were in a panic and did not know what do to. And what now? All gone, no lessons, there are almost no calls, at the pulpits there are only “peaceful” types…

And for Turkey, it muddles along in a state of barely concealed anxiety about its “chickens”—the thousands of fighters it allegedly funded and imported into Syria—coming home to roost as the fortunes of the twin insurrections in Iraq and Syria wither under a combined Russian, Syrian, Hezbollah, Iraqi, and Iranian assault leavened with some Western airstrikes.

And, make no mistake, foreign fighters are on the move.

Torn from the headlines, here’s General Breedlove, the NATO honcho,addressing the flows out of Syria on March 1:

In that latter category, foreign fighters, some of them were there and are returning. What worries, I think, the nations is that these foreign fighters return home and then, if — and then in a situation where there are no jobs or no way to address their desires and their approach to life, then they might use their skills in a bad way.

But criminality, terrorism and foreign fighters in there. The numbers, recently I’ve seen reported, are numbers I had not seen in the past, but some are reporting now that they believe as many as 9,000 fighters have gone and as much as 1,500 fighters have returned back to Europe. That’s not our numbers, but that’s the numbers I’m seeing widely reported.

In my opinion, the key perspective on the Islamist militant migration problem is not scary browns menacing Europe (or Breedlove’s efforts to spin the flood of refugees and fighters out of Syria and Iraq as a Russian attack on NATO members); it’s the creation of a tag-team dynamic between various terrorist battlefields and their core, the ultimate terrorist safe haven that has emerged in Libya.

Libya serves this function because the United States not only destroyed the secular, hostile-to-Islamists government; it went the extra mile to empower Islamists both by arming them during the anti-Qaddafi insurrection and by then declining to occupy Libya and slug it out with the locals as the US military did in Iraq post 2003.

Result: a failed state with few effective local or foreign institutions capable of displacing Islamist fighters.

The problem appears to have been exacerbated instead of resolved by a makework solution: exporting Libyan fighters out of country to conduct generously-compensated mayhem in Syria.

In my opinion, Libyan Islamist fighters—and the catastrophically failed scheme to dump them in Syria–are the genuine skeleton in Hillary Clinton’s closet.

Qaddafi was no friend of Libyan Islamists and not a few of them became radicalized fighters who fought all over Asia until the Libya regime change campaign provided a local outlet for their energies. They formed the core force, supported by US/NATO/GCC air and special operations forces, which overthrew Gaddafi.

However, relations between key Islamist commanders and the United States were relatively fraught.

During the brief rapprochement between Qaddafi’s Libya and the West, the US and UK had helpfully renditioned some key Libyan Islamists from overseas havens into the hands of Qaddafi; these leaders were subsequently released by Saif Qaddafi as part of a conciliation process that turned out to be, to say the least, ineffective. The released detainees were promptly and generously patronized by Gulf sponsors and received money, arms, and training that were critical to the overthrow of Qaddafi. They might have been enthusiastic anti-Qaddafi assets, but by no stretch of the imagination could they be considered tractable US proxies in the post-Qaddafi period.

Notably, after the deposition of Qaddafi in 2011, both Libyan fighters and leaders found their way to Syria in bulk. Solidarity with Sunni Islam against another apostate potentate undoubtedly played a role, but the United States was apparently anxious to give the US-backed civilian government of Mustafa Abdul Jalil some breathing space.

Abdul Hakim Belhadj, one of the renditioned Islamists, a veteran commander who received planeloads of aid from Qatar, whose Tripoli Brigade had broken through to the capital, occupied it, and administered it, and hoped to become Minister of Defense in the new order, was instead encouraged to take his talents to Syria—via Turkey on a ship with 400 tons of munitions. By early 2012, the US and GCC had responded to the collapse of the local Syrian democratic revolution by turning unambiguously to a strategy of foreign-supported insurrection using imported Islamist muscle and supplying them in part through the Libya ratline described by Seymour Hersh.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this was regarded as the cleverest of clever tricks: channeling Libyan fighters to Syria where they would become Assad’s headache instead of our headache: two birds with one stone!

Libyan fighters established a significant presence in Syria, providing training to inexperienced locals as well as serving as a fighting force eventually organized as the Katibat al-Battar brigade. The brigade provided a home for a variety of European militants (the Libyan dialect is intelligible to the European descendants of Moroccan and Algerian immigrants who form the backbone of the radical Islamic groups in France and Belgium). Its Euro-alumni formed the core of the group that perpetrated the Paris outrage in November 2015.

How’s that for blowback?

Understandably, the idea that the Paris attackers were nurtured by the same bunch we used to overthrow Gaddafi and then shipped to Syria in a clever little trick is a little too much bitter moral culpability to sweeten the West’s morning café au lait, so the Libyan angle is downplayed to emphasize the role of big bad ISIS to an almost ludicrous degree.

For that matter, the assault on the Benghazi US government annex that killed Ambassador Stephens is also unconvincingly dismissed as one of those inexplicable outbursts in Libya’s Wild East implicating an “eccentric, malcontent” Islamist and a stupid movie. The whole incident feels a bit different—and demands a more sophisticated explanation–when it’s characterized as violent dispute involving the US government and unknown interlocutors (just the fighters? What about their backers in the GCC or Turkey?) at a key MENA regional directorate and depot for export of fighters and material to Syria.

Maybe the US government knows the real reason why over 100 Islamist fighters stormed a CIA annex in a carefully planned operation—did somebody want to push the US and its qualms about delivering heavy weapons and MANPADs to Syria out of the way?– but doesn’t really want to talk about it.

Now the original fighters are coming home to Libya with their stature enhanced, their skills and connections upgraded, and their perspectives internationalized.

On top of homeward bound emigres, Libya can also attract a growing population of footloose transnational fighters brought into being by lavish Gulf and Turkish support of paramilitaries in Syria, and the fruits of an ISIS strategy to bulk up the Iraq/Syria Caliphate through the import of amateur enthusiasts as well as experienced fighters from around the world.

In addition, ISIS has taken advantage of the assets and opportunities offered by Libya to port its foreign-fighter driven insurrection model to the Libya platform and build a local operation from the ground up using freshly-recruited foreign fighters from places like Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria.

Beyond the hopefully obvious point that the United States has completely lost the plot when it comes to controlling, managing, and directing the murderous energies of Islamist fighters, I have another observation about the unappreciated consequences of an unacknowledged multi-decade rolling clusterf*ck:

The number of transnational fighters is getting bigger. It used to be there was a hard core of a few hundred to a few thousand Islamist fighters who would show up to help the locals in their struggle against the infidel du jour; now it’s tens of thousands.

And I think the Western security wonks are quietly going apesh*t over the fact that the reservoir of foreign fighters keeps growing even as JSOC whacks ‘em retail and the military campaign in Syria & Iraq takes ‘em out wholesale.

As the Jamestown Institute noted:

A March 2015 report commissioned by the United Nations Security Council found that the number of foreign fighters for Islamist causes worldwide was higher than it has ever been and had soared by 71 percent between mid-2014 and March 2015. The study concluded that Syria and Iraq, by far the biggest destinations for foreign fighters, had become a “finishing school for extremists.”

I am indebted to a master’s thesis prepared by Colonel Dallas Shaw, Libyan Foreign Fighters and Their Effects on the Libyan Revolution for some historical context.

Apparently, a total of perhaps 25-30,000 Arab fighters cycled through Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet war, with perhaps 3,000 to 4,000 present at any one time.

They mainly came from seven countries: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Algeria, Libya, and Morocco. In Afghanistan, they were a small part of big local effort (perhaps as many as a quarter million mujahedeen supported by hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign funding).

Colonel Shaw endorses the theory that foreign fighters have the biggest impact when they return to their home countries, which is, of course bad news for Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Algeria, Libya, and Morocco.

Therefore, it was something of a relief in the homelands, I expect, when someArab veterans of Aghanistan found their way to Chechnya, which was considered to be a potential replay of Afghanistan, i.e. defending a Muslim polity from Russian oppression.

Even a small number of hardened fighters can make a big difference. Al Qaeda’s Ibn al-Khattab took over effective control of the Chechen insurrection in the early part of this century with less than 1000 experienced and effectively led Arab fighters who had learned the ropes in Afghanistan. In the process, al Qaeda’s veterans trained a bunch of Chechen fighters.

And guess what! When the Chechnya/Dagestan effort foundered under a remorseless Russian assault, a cadre of Chechen fighters became available to the international jihadi effort. Chechen fighters allegedly went as far afield as Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban. By 2005, Chechen fighters were unambiguously established among forces fighting the US occupation in Iraq.

In a graphic illustration of the multi-conflict continuity of the Islamist fighter culture, by 2014 Chechens were “one of the four pillars of ISIS”, and a Chechen, Tarkhan Batirashvili,, a.k.a.. “Omar al-Shishani” or “Omar the Chechen” had been designated as the military commander of ISIS.

In other words, a fighter in a second-generation conflict, Chechnya, which had been seeded by the first generation of fighters out of Afghanistan, was now not only fighting in but leading a third-generation conflict in Iraq/Syria.

In 2005, Andrew Cordesmann and Nawaf Obaid estimated there were 3000 foreign fighters opposing the US occupation in Iraq, perhaps 4-10% of the total force.

And what’s going on today?

In all, between 27,000 and 31,000 foreign fighters from 86 countries have travelled to Iraq and Syria, the Soufan Group said, compared with a figure of about 12,000 foreign fighters in Syria when it last published a similar study in June 2014.

The Soufan Group added that between 20 and 30% of foreign fighters were returning to their home countries, creating major challenges for domestic security agencies as Isis in particular looks to carry out an increasing number of attacks overseas.

So, despite the JSOC, air strike, and drone-powered campaign to, depending on your perspective, either rip out terrorism at its roots or retire embarrassing assets, I’m guesstimating here, the number of foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq today are four to five times as many as were present at any single time in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet effort, or in Iraq during the campaign against the US.

That’s a lot of fighters, even assuming there’s a large percentage of hapless cannon fodder, which is apparently ISIS’ preferred use for the inexperienced enthusiasts it recruits wholesale through local scouts and the Internet, as these purported recollections of a disgruntled Dagestani jihadi on the Chechens in Syria website indicate.

And note, when Breedlove talks about fighters leaving Syria, they aren’t necessarily leaving in body bags. Globally, we’re not seeing a measurable reduction in the number of Islamist fighters. They’re just going home or, if they can’t go home, they’re ending up in other more hospitable jurisdictions.

Like Libya!

The U.S. now estimates that the number of ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria has decreased to between 19,000 and 25,000 resulting from battlefield deaths and a reduced flow of foreign fighters into Syria. Yet, as ISIS numbers have been reduced in Iraq and Syria, they have increased in Libya to 5,000 where ISIS has seen an increased flow of foreign fighters, U.S. officials said today.

…

The number of ISIS fighters in Libya was previously estimated at 2,000 to 3,000, the official said, speculating that there might be a correlation between the new ISIS estimates in Iraq/Syria and Libya as it’s getting harder for foreign fighters to get into Syria and that they may be diverting to Libya as a result.

Libyan fighters allied with ISIS already went back to Libya to establish a beachhead for the organization a couple years ago in the Islamists’ stomping grounds of Benghazi and Derna. Now that things in Syria and Iraq are, to put it mildly, going rather poorly for Islamist fighters, more of them are headed off to Libya, allegedly with assistance from Turkey and the Gulf States.

It’s not just footsoldiers looking for a Libyan hidey-hole.

On February 11, 2016, the Daily Mail announced that Omar al-Shishani, the Chechen in charge of ISIS’ military operations, had apparently arrived in Libya in a 14 car convoy. So he can carry on the Afghan/Chechen/Iraq & Syria tradition to a new generation of conflicts in North Africa!

And not only that, Abdelhakim Belhadj—the strongman we shipped to Syria because he was too much of a handful for the civilian government in Tripoli–is back! Belhadj is a military mainstay of the General National Congress (GNC) the faction holding down the Tripoli end of a pretty much de facto partitioned Libya.

In more news of the burgeoning Libya Islamist franchise, Al Jazeera, which indefatigably stooged for Qatar-backed Islamists in Libya during the anti-Qaddafi operation, reported that Qaddafi’s home town of Sirte is now in the hands of ISIS, specifically in the hands of foreign fighters predominantly from North Africa. So it looks like ISIS has ported its “recruit in bulk” strategy for foreign fighters out of Syria and into the more favorable environment of Libya.

America’s swing at neutralizing Libyan militants through a “fight abroad” program in Syria looks like a spectacular screwup.

Clearly, with the US & NATO apparently short both on will and capable proxies, let alone an effective Libyan army, and without an effective and anxious neighbor like Iran (Egypt apparently unwilling or unable to try to set things right), Libya has emerged as a haven for Islamist fighters.

Instead of disappearing into the maw of the Syrian conflict, our Libyan Islamist proxies are coming home, and bringing a lot of new buddies to operate in the Libyan chaos that was somehow supposed to get fixed while they were gone.

The US botched execution of two simultaneous regime change gambits has fostered the creation of a durable colony of Islamist fighters in what used to be Libya, one that looks uniquely dangerous and difficult for the US to contain or eradicate.

Libya, thanks to the grim dynamics of Islamic insurgency, Gulf cupidity, and Western malign neglect, has become established as the key host and supplier and resupplier and recruiter of transnational fighters and the numbers are increasing. It’s not just a full circle for Hillary Clinton, it’s an escalating spiral, one that she probably doesn’t feel like celebrating.

The US and NATO are anxiously trying to come up with a plan to neutralize Islamist fighters in Libya, without explaining to the public or itself how it’s going to do that with the complete absence of a national government and functioning army and without putting foreign boots on the ground—and avoid admitting that the deposition of Qaddafi created a worse crisis than the one we were allegedly trying to resolve.

But the consequences of this particular fiasco are more than the usual litany of US failure, mismanagement of murderous proxies, well-concealed embarrassment, and massive loss of local life that blots the US Middle East copybook like a trail of blood spatter.

In a piece of bad luck that Secretary Clinton perhaps didn’t consider while blithely imploding Libya, Libya happens to be in a neighborhood of rickety regimes ill-equipped to handle a failed state swarming with professional Islamist militants in their midst.

Nowadays Libya-wise we get maps that look like this as the militants, conveniently and centrally located in the heart of Muslim Africa, not only pitch in to fight the civil war against Tripoli-based Islamists and the Qaddafi-regime retreads that the US is now vainly hoping will restore order, but also pursue mischief in North Africa:

Let’s number some interesting consequences that conventional reporting/think tankers appear rather loath to confront, largely because the problem grew out of the morally and strategically lazy reliance on arm’s length Islamist fighters to do the geopolitical dirty work from Afghanistan onward—and the inability to permanently retire them.

First, there is a sizable cadre of transnational Islamist fighters.

Second, the cadre appears to get bigger with every conflict.

Third, the disruption this cadre causes looks to become bigger and bigger as it feeds on fresh conflicts.

Fourth, thanks to the irresponsible decision to go regime change on the cheap simultaneously in Libya and Syria using Islamist assets, we seem to have a deadly dynamic where the Islamists can trade off between Middle Eastern and North African havens/battlegrounds. Containment is a fantasy; we are looking at chasing militants over multiple fronts in a number of failed/failing/distressed states.

Fifth, the will is lacking to engage in a truly ugly no holds barred hemispheric war to eradicate this cadre. On one end of the spectrum, you’ve got sponsors quite rightly terrified that their proxies will come home and turn on them (and probably covertly throwing money at them to keep them happy and their activities directed elsewhere); on the other, you’ve got a global hegemon loath to put “boots on the ground”.

Sixth, an understandable instinct is to kick the can down the road, i.e. hope/help the fighters get distracted by some remote conflict, even though it feeds the beast and lets the problem grow bigger.

Kicking the can into Libya is the worst possible strategy if anybody’s serious about trying to eliminate Islamist fighters as a global security priority. Who’s gonna slug it out on behalf of the secular/national forces? General Haftar, currently running some regime in Tobruk with one foot in Egypt? The GCC, hopelessly bogged down in Yemen? The US, EU, and NATO, who want to pretend Libya is roadkill in the rear view mirror and not a T. Rex of Islamist fighters gaining on the West?

I have a terrible feeling that Muslim Africa is the next region to get mauled. The inevitable strategic brainwave is to quietly bomb & drone the cr*p out of Libya, but even if the Islamist fighters are put on the defensive, they’ll just slop over into a neighboring vulnerable at risk-state. Libya borders on six such states. That might be too big a mess even for Africom to want to dip its boot in.

I wonder if US strategists appreciate the fact that it was only thanks to the resolve, unity, and national capacity of Iran that the heart of the Middle East is experiencing even a modicum of stabilization after two US-sponsored sh*t shows. Unfortunately, there’s no Iran down by Libya, there’s just Egypt. Good luck with that.

Seventh, no need to wonder why PRC is paranoid about Xinjiang. I’m sure there are natsec geniuses in a number of Western capitals (I’ll include Ankara in the category) who think pumping some fighters—including Uyghur formations Erdogan had thoughtfully inserted into northern Syria–into Afpak/Central Asia would be the best way to ease their local pressure & put some heat on the PRC. The PRC’s response will be to pave the entire AR if necessary to contain the problem, instead of letting it spin out of control as the US did in MENA. Anybody, whether of the cynical realist, romantic nationalist, Islamist enthusiast, or sentimental people-gotta-be free persuasion, who yearns for an Islamist-tinged rebellion in Xinjiang is criminally irresponsible. In my opinion.

We talk about the litany of US failure in Iraq under George W. Bush as a lost decade of catastrophe, with good reason.

But more and more it looks like the US adventure in Libya was a disaster with even more dire global consequences. It not only ruined that country; it turned Islamist fighters into a metastasizing transnational problem that will destabilize Africa and torment the world for at least another decade.

I don’t know how actively the United States supported the export of Libyan fighters to Syria, and if and how much it wrung its hands as the GCC and Turkey ran the ratline. It appears that the Obama administration did not share Turkey and the GCC’s enthusiasm for inflating the number of local and foreign forces inside Syria and Iraq as a recipe for victory. Judging by news reports, ISIS came up with the idea of mass recruiting of low quality jihadi wannabes in bulk on its own.

But as the movement of transnational Islamist fighters enters its fifth generation stage in North Africa, it looks like the key mistake was destroying the Libyan state, putting nothing in its place, and allowing it to be colonized by a growing number of Islamist fighters.

And Hillary owns that.

(Reprinted from China Matters by permission of author or representative)

• Category: Foreign Policy • Tags: Hillary Clinton, Libya

Remembering Kim Young Oak

Peter Lee

• February 28, 2016

• 2,400 Words

• 5 Comments

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Around the corner from my home in LA’s Koreatown is the “Kim Young Oak Academy”. I had assumed it was a private cram school serving the local ethnic Korean kids, maybe with a punny name along the lines of “once an acorn, in the future a mighty oak” aspirations.

Not true.

KYO Academy is a LAUSD outfit serving a predominantly Hispanic (85% or so) student body. Notably, it is an experiment in “single-sex education” trying to raise achievement by teaching boys and girls in separate classes instead of co-ed environments. This approach, it must be said, is apparently not yielding spectacular results judging from KYO’s lower quintile rankings in the state test scores. Interested readers can go here for an analysis of the rather equivocal outcomes in same-sex programs across the country.

The school, it turns out, is named for one of the most remarkable figures in Asian-American history, Kim Young Oak, who grew up in Los Angeles.

I had the good fortune to come across a biography of Kim, Unsung Hero: The Story of Colonel Young Oak Kim, authored by Woo Sung Han in Korean based on five years of research, and translated into English by Edward Chang, who runs the aptly named Kim Young Oak Center for Korean American Studies at UC Riverside.

The book devotes a lot of space to Kim’s military exploits in World War II and the Korean War. Kim was apparently a supremely talented military commander, with an instinctive grasp of terrain and infantry and artillery tactics, a brilliant and thorough operations officer, and cool and clear-headed as a combat leader. He was highly decorated, to put it mildly.

Kim earned at least 19 medals, including the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, three Purple Hearts and the French Croix de Guerre, the National Order of the Legion of Honor from France, the Bronze Medal of Military Valor from Italy, and the ROK’s highest military honor, the Taegeuk Cordon of the Order of Military Merit. The fact that Kim never received a US Medal of Honor is a sore point for his supporters and ascribed to shortcomings of documentation by his superiors.

More to the point, officers and enlisted men wanted to serve under him, and his superiors turned to him when a task demanded careful and creative planning, determined execution, and inspiring and effective leadership in the field. One notable patron was William McCaffrey (who was Kim’s superior as a colonel in Korea and ultimately rose to become a Lieutenant General; he was the father of Gen. Barry McCaffrey of Rumaila Causeway massacre and drug czar notoriety).

Being a “fair haired boy” had some genuine life-saving advantages. Kim was seriously wounded both in the World War II and the Korean War and in both cases his commanders made special efforts to take care of him. In World War II he received a treatment of penicillin (at that time both a rare privilege for connected patients and an agonizing program of four shots a day for ten days in the arms and buttocks):

The repeated doses hardened the injection sites and by the time Young Oak had received twenty shots, his arms had turned into rocks. They could hardly find a soft spot to put the needle in, as it would bend the metal tips…[Unsung Hero, pp. 140-141]

In the Korean War, when Kim was wounded on an exposed hillside, his commander overrode the refusal of the helicopter crew to order a risky high altitude front line evacuation.

Despite the favor shown to Kim by his superiors, an unavoidable subtext of Kim’s story is his experience of racial discrimination. He started serving in a segregated unit and was the first Asian-American commander of a battalion in the history of the US Army.

Reflecting on his experience, near the end of his life Kim told an interviewer:

“America is unique and special, and true democracy is only really successful here in America. We’re a beacon for the rest of the world, but we have a long way to go. We have to continue to educate people not to be prejudiced and not to hate others. People today are less biased than people 25 years ago – that shows progress – and progress is hard to make. But I have great hopes for young people, and I am pleased with the young people I’ve met.”

In light of his military abilities, his service, and the esteem in which he was held by members of the top brass, Kim probably deserved to become a general officer. That he did not is in part attributable to the fact that the US Army was a white old boy’s network that took care of its own first.

In his discussions with his biographer, Kim was forthright in discussing and naming officers he didn’t particularly care for, one of whom was William Westmoreland.

Westmoreland was allegedly on President Eisenhower’s “rocket list” of ten or so officers he had tagged for rapid promotion. At the time of the Korean War, Westmoreland had no combat experience—a prerequisite for promotion to general officer in the US Army—so he was given command of a front line battalion for two months during a prolonged, relatively fighting-free stalemate late in the war.

Kim served in the neighboring battalion and worked out a suitable disposition for the two forces to cover their section of the front in a formation that was reasonable for both. But Westmoreland vetoed it and Kim’s superior backed down:

In Young Oak’s eyes, Westmoreland was an officer who actually knew nothing about the infantry, which was different from his reputation, or he was simply an officer who cared about his own record and not the safety of the soldiers…The new [contact point between Kim’s & Westmoreland’s battalions] suggested by Westmoreland would have made his regiment impregnable, but would have easily exposed Young Oak’s battalion to the Chinese. Fortunately, the enemy didn’t attack. After this experience, Young Oak assumed Westmoreland would become a general someday. Young Oak also thought Westmoreland was someone who would sacrifice his men at any moment for his own glory. [Unsung Hero, pp.344-345]

Perhaps since the book was originally written for a Korean audience, the treatment and naming and shaming of US officers who, in Kim’s view, didn’t measure up, is quite unvarnished.

However, I think it would be incorrect to treat Kim’s criticisms as sour-graping by a retired military guy who felt he didn’t receive his due.

Kim’s biography offers some interesting insights into the workings of the US Army in the 1940s and 1950s.

Judging from his recollections, it was staffed by good, bad, and indifferent managers just like any other business. Only difference was, instead of making you work late on Christmas Eve, a bad officer could, through incompetence, callousness, or malice, get you killed.

I’m assuming that thirty years of continual warfare by a volunteer military has ironed out some of the bumps since then, but it is remarkable in Kim’s time how many bad officers there were and, for that matter, how many officers realized they didn’t have what it took to lead in combat and happily turned over their duties to Kim.

Kim’s career fresh out of Officer’s Candidate School sees him refusing orders he saw as stupid. Even when he follows orders, there’s a lot of “I want my objection put on the record”; and quite a few condemnations of murderous command idiocy, particularly during the Korean War.

The bitter coda to Kim’s frontline service was the severe wound he received during the Korean War in August 1951 as the result of a friendly fire incident. The artillery spotter plane lazily assumed that US forces couldn’t really be occupying a hill intruding so far into enemy territory and the orange identifying placard Kim had put out must be fake. The hill was plastered with 25 rounds of nasty anti-personnel ordnance that exploded above ground level for maximum shrapnel lethality before the barrage was stopped. Kim was badly wounded and, as mentioned above, was helicopter evac’d out.

According to his biography, Kim was ordered up there to distract an impatient corps commander from relieving Colonel McCaffrey on the spot for unacceptably slow progress in taking some other hill. Apparently Kim’s capture of the dangerously exposed and strategically dubious objective (surrounded on three sides by Chinese forces) occasioned enough high-fiving for the corps commander to leave the command post in good humor–and leave Colonel McCaffrey in continued possession of his command (and his career).

Kim’s superiors demanded a court martial for the offending artillery battalion for its friendly fire transgression but the corps commander was apparently not interested, nah uh, and the whole thing got dropped.

It would be interesting to check how the US Army wrote this thing up in its official history of the Korean War.

Anyway, Kim was evacuated to Osaka where only the sustained efforts of a crack medical team from Johns Hopkins managed to save his legs. But by the time he was able to return to active duty, he had missed his chance to climb the steep pyramid of advancement to general officer and retired a colonel in 1972 on 85% disability.

In 1999, Kim served on the expert’s committee attached to the US investigation of the massacre at No Gun Ri. On No Gun Ri, it should be said, he supported the US Army’s version of events meant to beat back the allegations reported by AP, one that was undercut by a subsequent disclosure of more damning documentation that the DoD had suppressed. Not his finest hour, perhaps, but at 80 years of age and in poor health, I would suggest Kim was not in a position to independently review and analyze the million pages of documentation the US assembled to shape its narrative of what had happened.

The truest measure of Colonel Kim’s character and stature are perhaps are revealed in his achievements beyond his military record.

Kim grew up in a household steeped in Korean nationalism. His father had opposed the Japanese occupation of Korea and fled to the United States, where he was extremely active in the Korean diaspora’s mobilization on behalf of Korean independence. When Syngman Rhee came to Los Angeles to promote his movement, he would stay in the Kim family’s modest home.

Despite this background in anti-Japanese agitation, Kim refused a transfer out of the unit he had been assigned to out of OCS: the 100^th Battalion, the “Go For Broke Battalion” of Japanese-Americans which distinguished itself during World War II. (He had probably been assigned to the segregated unit because his mother’s passport showed her nationality as “Japanese” thanks to Japanese conquest of the Korean peninsula). Instead, after an initial round of bigoted Korean-baiting, he successfully commanded a platoon, then a company, and rose to the position of battalion operations officer during the Italian campaign.

After the war, he opened a chain of coin-op laundries and employed Japanese-Americans to give them a leg up after the US internment program had destroyed their previous livelihoods. During the Korean War, as battalion commander he supported an orphanage in Seoul.

After retirement, Kim endured 40 operations that attempted to deal with the continual pain he suffered from the wounds he suffered in Korea. Nevertheless, he fulfilled a vow, quoted in his biography, to “devote his life to the betterment of the community I belong to.”

That community was not just Korean-Americans. I’ll let Wikipedia do the heavy lifting here:

Kim was the first person to serve on the United Way board for a total of 10 years. He recognized the underserved ethnic communities in Los Angeles and worked to provide them with linguistically and culturally competent services. When Kim joined the board, the Chinatown Service Center was the only United Way Asian Center. Kim added the Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Korean American Centers to United Way. He also diversified the board with three more Asian American members.

Kim continued to be an active member of the Asian American community and beyond.

In 1975, he helped found the Korean Youth and Cultural Center, now known as the Koreatown Youth and Community Center. The organization now serves more than 11,000 immigrants from Asia and Latin America each year. It helps youth and families in Los Angeles who are struggling with poverty and language barriers. Kim further served the Korean American community, as a founding member of the Korean American Coalition (KAC) from 1985 to 2005. The KAC has an ongoing goal to promote civic and civil rights interests of the Korean American community, through education, community organization, leadership development, and coalition-building with diverse communities.

From 1986 to 1988, Kim served as a member of Serving the Family & Friends of the Keiro Homes, part of a non-for-profit healthcare organization that promotes healthy lifestyles for the elderly. Throughout the 1990s he served as Chairman of the Center for Pacific Asian Families, an organization that was founded to help address violence and sexual assault in the Asian and Pacific Islander communities. Under his leadership, the Center for Pacific Asian Families became the largest women’s shelter in Southern California.

In 1986, Kim co-founded the Korean Health, Education, Information, and Research Center to provide new, uninformed immigrants with the health care information and services that they are entitled to receive by law in America. As one of the largest ethnic charity organizations today, it continues to help new immigrants obtain basic health care and offers them bilingual services in English, Spanish, and Korean.

Kim participated in the founding of the Korean American Museum, the Japanese American National Museum, and the Go For Broke Foundation. He also lent his name to opposition to the Iraq War and to support for comfort women.

Kim Young Oak is worthy of commemoration and emulation, so I wrote this story as an example to myself and also to fellow readers who might be inspired by this account of his achievements.

More information on Kim’s life can be found at the website of UC Riverside’s Young Oak Kim Center for Korean American Studies, and on the website of the Kim Young Oak Academy (including a video of a 50-minute talk by Edward Chung).

(Reprinted from China Matters by permission of author or representative)

• Category: History • Tags: Kim Young Oak

About Those Missiles on Woody Island

Peter Lee

• February 24, 2016

• 600 Words

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I have an article up exclusively at Asia Times Online, South China Sea Face-off: The Mystery of Woody Island. Go ahead, click the link!

It addresses the media freakout over a Fox News report that commercial satellite imagery revealed something that looked like HQ-9 surface-to-air missile launchers were on the beach at Woody Island in the Paracels.

Official reactions in the PRC were noticeably…strange. The PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs was clearly blindsided by the whole thing, indicating that whatever was happening was not part of a carefully planned provocation/escalation.

On the US side, Admiral Harris said rather belatedly that the report, “if verified”, was an unwelcome sign that Xi Jinping was breaking his “pledge” not to militarize the South China Sea.

(I don’t go into in the AT piece, but as I noted at the time of Xi’s visit, he never “pledged” not to militarize, he simply said he didn’t intend to. The idea that Xi would unilaterally and individually make “pledges” to the United States concerning areas the PRC considers sovereign territory is apparently not too ludicrous to be entertained by the Western media at large.)

Anyway, it turns out that the Woody Island deployment, if it actually occurred (I’m always a tad skeptical when these things are documented by expert photo analysis of fuzzy commercial imagery), was not the first time the PRC has put missile launchers on Woody Island; in fact it would have been the third time.

And since Woody Island is a key PRC military facility of decades standing, characterizing rotations of military equipment on and off the island are hard to spin as “militarization”.

The HQ-9s might have been put on Woody Island to support the deployment of J-11 fighters, something which is supposedly happening now. It would be the second deployment of J-11s since the airport was enlarged to accommodate them, apparently something the PRC does in rotations instead of stationing them permanently and risking corrosion of the airframes from prolonged exposure to salt air.

And, of course, the Paracels are genuine, not man-made islands a couple hundred kilometers from Hainan, not the infuriating fake-island Spratlys down by the Philippines.

The Paracels do have issues. In fact they are a permanent obstacle to any formal settlement in the South China Sea since their seizure from Vietnam in 1974 is the hottest of hot button issues and Vietnam will never acknowledge PRC sovereignty over them. The US doesn’t like the archipelagic baseline the PRC claims around the whole group of island (instead of calculating individual territorial waters/EEZs like UNCLOS wants) and the most recent USN FONOP challenged this particular piece of cartography.

But the Paracels and Woody Island are not part of the Spratly island building/militarization fears/nine-dash-line/salami-slicing/arbitration fracas that obsesses the United States right now.

As such they are not a particularly effective venue for the PRC to “defy” President Obama and the ASEAN confrerees at Sunnylands, the allegation that Fox (and its DoD partner in leakage) were trying to push.

All of this, of course, just factual noise in the media “Missiles in the South China Sea!” frenzy. As I write in the piece:

Just like in Hollywood, the motto for reporting on the military in Asia is “Nobody knows anything.” Exactly the way the DoD likes it, I expect.

As far as I can tell, the big outlets ran with the Fox story without demanding a look at unambiguous high-res imagery from US spy satellites or, for that matter, trying to get a comment from the PRC apparatus before running the story.

No fun or profit in that, I guess.

The prevailing media zeitgeist appears to be that PRC propaganda must be balanced, in an info-war sort of way, with equally crappy adversarial reporting in part, I suspect, to punish the PRC for its serial mistreatment of foreign journos and their employers.

Might as well get used to it.

(Reprinted from China Matters by permission of author or representative)

• Category: Foreign Policy • Tags: China, HQ-9 SAMs, Paracels, South China Sea, US Navy, Woody Island

Keeping the Panda at Arm’s Length

The China Factor in the Apple/FBI Battle

Peter Lee

• February 22, 2016

• 1,300 Words

• 3 Comments

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I take perverse pleasure (note to self: discuss with analyst!) in parting company with my libertarian/lefty buddies on the issue of the FBI’s demand that Apple assist in accessing an iPhone phone of the San Bernardino shooter.

The shadow of the People’s Republic of China—and the demands it plans to impose on US vendors of telecom/IT equipment in China once the Obama administration has established the benchmark for law enforcement intrusion—hangs over the whole debate.

And I believe the Obama administration has done a pretty canny job of getting law enforcement’s foot in the door while not letting the CCP panda completely in the tent.

First off, some techy details, as I understand them. (If I misunderstand them, and somebody points them out, I will happily and humbly correct.)

On older iPhones, if the user was lazy and stuck with a four position numerical passcode instead of choosing a fancier, longer option, local enforcement could attach a “crappy Chinese box”, in the words of an iPhone forensics expert (costing a mere $355 and well within the reach of local cops), to brute force the passcode. i.e. input four-digit numbers into the phone until it hit the right combo. No more.

A few years ago, Apple updated its security strategy and created unique difficulties to law enforcement. Specifically, the phone’s memory is wiped (actually the decryption key needed to access the encrypted data gets “forgot” by the phone) if 10 unsuccessful attempts are made to enter the passcode.

To make things extra difficult, Apple installed a separate processor on the new iOS8 iPhones in an area called “Secure Enclave” to handle the passcode/encryption duties. It includes some circuitry with burned-in random numbers (unique to each phone and “forgotten” i.e. subsequently unknown by Apple) that can’t be read for the purpose of “mirroring” or copying the phone’s memory. If the phone’s memory can’t be mirrored, it can’t be loaded into a computer or a bazillion computers to attack the mirrors simultaneously to try to hit the passcode.

There are tech rumblings that the burned-in numbers might be vulnerable to physical inspection i.e. peeling off the chip’s epoxy coating without destroying it and reading the circuits with a scanning electron microscope for mirroring. But not yet.

Supposedly, even if Apple helps out by disabling the wipe function, the FBI still can’t mirror the new phones for parallel attacks; the only phones they’ll be able to break are the ones that a) they have in their physical possession and b) have rather lame, un-terrorist-worthy four digit numerical passcodes that can be bruteforced through sequential attempts on the phone itself. Gotta wonder if this is really the case, given the FBI’s avid interest in this capability.

The government’s demand that Apple provide a firmware update that will disable the wipe function on this one phone has elicited a chorus of heroic squealing both from Apple jefe Tim Cook and the privacy/tech/Apple-adoring segments of the Internet, complaints that I find unconvincing and, I suspect, the Obama administration finds rather irritating.

A lot of thought, I believe, has gone into the government’s case, and it is designed to split the baby into three parts that satisfy a) privacy advocates b) law enforcement and c) the US government’s anxieties about inevitable PRC demands for reciprocal treatment from US tech companies.

The symbolic/precedent setting character of this demand is clear from the fact that the specter of the terrorist bogeyperson has been unleashed by invocation of the San Bernardino shooting even though it’s not terribly likely that Farouk kept a lot of vital info about his rampage on his employer-provided/four digit passcode phone (a phone, by the way, that could have been made transparent to his employer with a $20 piece of software); and the fact that the FBI made its demand public instead of just talking to Apple privately.

I will also add my suspicion that the FBI already knows what’s on the phone, or simply doesn’t care. Supposedly, in some goof-up during the investigation, the FBI botched a password reset attempt to gain access to the iCloud account linked to the phone, so that the phone couldn’t back up its precious contents to the cloud–where Apple apparently can help extract them. Oops, so sorry, here comes the All Writs Warrant for Apple to create the firmware bypass to the 10-and-out function on the phone itself.

Anyway, the US government is not demanding a back door that would enable the FBI to eavesdrop on the phone covertly while it’s in the hand of the user; instead it wants Apple to develop a utility that allows the FBI to attack an encrypted phone that is in its physical custody and obtained, presumably, under color of law in a criminal investigation. And it’s only asking for a one-time firmware update prepared by Apple itself and then destroyed, with Apple exclusively handling its signing certificate, thereby denying the US government a real “backdoor” tool, the ability to deliver certified firmware updates into any and all iPhones.

So, no apparent surveillance capabilities (unless the assumption is that the government will do some TAO operation, acquire a target phone, spend a few days burning it up to read the hardwired factors and bruteforcing the passcode, extract the encrypt/decrypt key, and then covertly return the phone to the hapless enduser in order to spy on him or her; yes, inevitably there will be plans of this sort, but only at the outer limits of practicality), to keep the privacy advocates happy; a legup to the FBI on a rather knotty encryption problem; and relatively limited benefits to the PRC, which craves a universal backdoor into the iPhone for nefarious realtime surveillance of targeted individuals and, instead can only occupy itself with extracting one-time assistance from Apple for single phones in law enforcement custody, presumably only for the noblest and best-articulated of reasons.

And I think Apple understands it too, and what we are seeing with this massive Apple-polishing privacy campaign is an elaborate piece of kabuki whose major purpose is to demonstrate both to its customer base and to the PRC government that it will not provide phone-forcing utilities unless it’s a one-phone deal in response to categorical formal legal compulsion, and executed only by Apple and not by turning over the software fix (probably not terribly fancy) and, most importantly, its signing certificate over to some government agency for repeated use at the government’s discretion and maybe without crossing the search warrant/due process/human rights Ps and Qs.

If I was Apple (and the Obama administration and, for that matter, people who worry about PRC bullying of US IT firms for access to source code, surveillance utilities and the like) I would look for a graceful way to cave in response to a one-time demand through a court in a single case. Better to button up this issue now, in other words, rather than open the door for the Congress to pass a CALEA-style law with a blanket obligation for Apple to cooperate on issues of this sort–a precedent that would make the PRC pretty happy.

Cynic that I am, I would not be surprised if this public spectacle was paralleled in private by a side deal between Apple and the US government to diddle with the physical encapsulation of the Secure Enclave chip to make it accessible to the FBI, and maybe get more liberal with sharing the signing certificate. After all Apple, though a relatively insignificant provider of goods and services to the US government compared to behemoth spook servicers Google and Microsoft, is facing uncomfortable scrutiny over a $30 billion/year income tax diddle it’s conducting through its (physically nonexistent) Irish affiliate; so the Apple executive agenda probably doesn’t include scorched-earth opposition to the United States or, for that matter, against the People’s Republic of China, which now accounts more than 25% of Apple profits.

In other words, a solution cleverly designed to completely please no own. And, by that criterion, apparently a signal success!

(Reprinted from China Matters by permission of author or representative)

• Category: Foreign Policy • Tags: Apple, China, FBI, San Bernadino Massacre, Secure Enclave

Mamasapano: The Philippines' Benghazi

Peter Lee

• February 5, 2016

• 3,600 Words

• 30 Comments

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On January 25, 2015, 44 members of the 84^th and 55^th Companies of the Philippine National Police Special Action Force or SAF died in an engagement with Muslim insurgents near Mamasapano on the island of Mindanao.

Perhaps there have been worse days for special forces, but I can’t bring any to mind. The bloodbath is recognized as a tactical and political fiasco, a focus of popular anger and dismay, and a source of considerable political embarrassment for President Aquino. Its anniversary was marked with fresh hearings on the disaster in the Philippine Senate. It’s the Philippines’ Benghazi scandal.

Like Benghazi, Mamasapano also reveals some interesting new things about expansive US security operations overseas…things that are getting covered up and swept aside in a rush to make political hay out of the disaster.

The short story is that the SAF ventured into a stronghold of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, an insurgency seeking self-determination for the Muslim population of Mindanao, to apprehend a Malaysian miscreant, one Marwan, wanted for making the bombs for the 2001 Bali attacks that claimed 200 lives. Marwan was killed in the operation but an SAF force was attacked during the withdrawal and suffered tremendous casualties before it could be extracted.

Long story is that the SAF troopers were pinned down in a cornfield for 10 hours—which must have felt like a thousand eternities—getting slaughtered by MILF snipers. Only one member of the 55^th Company survived. While this massacre dragged on, three SAF companies supporting the operation stayed in their backstop roles instead of advancing to cover the withdrawal. Command bickered about providing supporting artillery fire and sending in evac helicopters. In the aftermath, it transpired that the military—Armed Forces of the Philippines aka AFP—was not able to provide effective support because they were not involved in the planning of the raid. The Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Defense were totally flummoxed because they had no prior knowledge of the operation. President Aquino had personally greenlighted the operation—Oplan Exodus—and passed the order to the SAF commander, Gutelio Napenas, through the former Director-General of the Philippine National Police Alan Purisima. Former, because at the time of the operation Padremas had been suspended from the force for corruption, leaving President Aquino pretty far out on a limb, chain of command wise.

By a suspicious coincidence, President Aquino was lingering in the nearby town of Zamboanga the day the operation went down, well positioned to share in the expected triumph of the neutralization of Marwan, an obsession of the United States who had a US$5 million bounty on his head.

In parallel with Benghazi, there is even a “stand down” narrative.

It is plausibly alleged that President Aquino, instead of ordering the AFP to waste the perimeter with artillery fire & send in the cavalry by helicopter for evacuation, tried to defuse the situation by contacting the MILF through mediators and begging them for hours to back off. The Philippine government itself released a timeline documenting joint attempts with the MILF leadership to effect a ceasefire. Apparently the message only got through to the local MILF commanders at 4:00 pm, because a brownout the night before had prevented them from charging their cellphones.

The MILF, you see, is in negotiations with the government in Manila concerning a law, the Bangsamoro Basic Law or BBL, that would grant Mindanao considerable autonomy and there’s some kind of truce in place. Apparently sending the SAF into Mamasapano unannounced to pick up Marwan (who was sheltering with another group, not the MILF) was a violation of this truce, and perhaps it was felt that killing clutches of MILF fighters during an extraction would sink the Mindanao peace process once and for all.

As it stands, the BBL is dead in the water anyway, thanks to public outrage at the MILF for massacring the 44 SAF troopers.

The fact that President Aquino still has his job after this mega-fracaso is a tribute to something, I suppose. Perhaps a tribute to term limits. President Aquino leaves office for good in early 2016 and will perhaps can look forward to relentless pursuit by his adversaries and the aggrieved families of the victims once he has lost the protection of his office. For the time being, the designated fall guy is the SAF commander, Getulio Napenas.

Napenas, defending himself from accusations of incompetence, overconfidence, and loose-cannon behavior, had an interesting defense: that he was working with the United States.

Asked if the operation was solely a Philippine effort, Napenas replied that the US, through its Joint Special Operations Task Force Philippines based in Zamboanga City, provided real time intelligence support, training and equipment during the preparations and, during the execution, humanitarian and medical support and “investigation,” referring to the handover of Marwan’s finger to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for DNA confirmation.

Napenas also confirmed that the units involved in the operation were trained by a combination of US military and JSOTF members.

When Enrile asked whether the CIA participated in Exodus, Napenas said the name of the agency was “never mentioned” but added that because intelligence was involved, it was “likely” that personnel from the spy agency were also involved.

And there’s this:

US military officials were present the whole time at the tactical command post in Shariff Aguak in Maguindanao, while a “tall, blond, blue-eyed Caucasian” was seen among the slain SAF men.

There were also reports that a US drone from a Zamboanga flew overhead a week before the operation.

The PNP review determined that six Americans were involved in the operation.

According to the initial “draft” Senate report from March 2015:

“One of six Americans involved in the Mamasapano assault ordered the Philippine Army’s 6th Infantry Division commander, Major General Edmundo Pangilinan, to fire artillery, but Pangilinan refused and reportedly told the American: “Do not dictate to me what to do. I am the commander here!”

“The testimonies of various resource persons, particularly during the executive hearings, provide indications that the US had significant participation in Oplan Exodus,” the executive summary of the Senate report read.

According to various media reports, Napenas identified one of the US advisors as either “Al Latz” or “Al Katz”. There has been no stampede by Western media outlets to try to track down this interesting individual.

The US was compelled to confirm that it advised the operation, but insists its only direct involvement—documented by an AFP photo—was casualty evacuation.

US military involvement in Philippine operations is a dicey constitutional, legal, diplomatic, and political question. Officially, the United States military is restricted to non-combat roles in the Philippines, although plenty of wriggle room does seem to exist. US military personnel can accompany Philippine forces during operations and defend themselves if fired upon. Direct operational participation by JSOC in dozens of AFP operations is, at least on the left, openly alleged.

The hand-in-glove ally and pivot partner of the US, Alberto Del Rosario’s Department of Foreign Affairs chipped in with its defense:

In a report submitted to the Senate, the Philippines’ Department of Foreign Affairs said that based on their discussions with US authorities, they were able to ascertain that Oplan Exodus was 100-percent Filipino planned and implemented.

“The DFA emphasized that ‘the only constitutionally restricted activity in Philippine cooperation with the US under existing agreements is that, they (US) may not and have not, in the case of Mamasapano either, engage in combat operations and which non-participation (of the Americans) in combat was affirmed by PDIR Napeñas,” the report said.

Ah-huh.

On one level, the Philippines looks like another example where the United States cultivates a loyal and dependable local kinetic asset to enable lethal operations in nations where the US doesn’t have the legal right to operate freely but feels regular forces are too corrupt, compromised, or incompetent to properly execute US objectives. And there’s often hints that US “advisors” tiptoe over the non-combat line at crucial junctures to get things done. I wrote about it here in the context of the US drug war in Mexico and Colombia.

There is another twist, one that comes courtesy of a 2012 AP report on a previous attempt to get Marwan, one of many, many tries, that time involving the Philippine army, not the PNP/SAF, to kill Marwan using GPS-guided smart bombs delivered by turboprop (the same weapon used to assassinate FARC commander Raul Reyes):

(Smart bombs) offer a less manpower-intensive way to combat Abu Sayyaf at a time when both the Philippines and the US militaries want to focus resources on tensions with China in the West Philippine Sea (South China Sea). They also dovetail with a change in recent years from massive offensives to surgical, intelligence-driven strikes that target holdouts of the battered Abu Sayyaf.

So also consider the Mamasapano massacre as blowback from a US/Philippine decision to transition from a military to political/security force joint approach in Mindanao, using a different group of actors—actors that fatally lacked their own coordinated artillery and airlift.

But using the Philippine National Police is a bit hinky legally as well as tactically, since the conventional understanding of sanctioned cooperation is between the US military and the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

The conventional understanding is that the US and Philippines have military to military cooperation, with the US in advisory/training/non-combat role…to the Armed Forces of the Philippines. It should be noted that JSOC in the Philippines—headquartered at Zamboanga, indeed at the airfield where President Aquino lingered on the day of the assault—frames its activities in terms of cooperation with AFP—the Philippine military.

JSOC is not formally partnered with the PNP or SAF, which are civilian forces under the Ministry of Interior. Nevertheless, General Napenas directly identified JSOC Zamboanga as his working partner for the assault. And the idea that US milsec was expanding its cooperation with the Philippines to encompass domestic law enforcement did not sit well with Philippine Senate Minority Leader Juan Ponce Enrile.

Enrile said he asked about the VFA because the pact “deals only with the military” and “does not cover the enforcement of the criminal laws of the Philippines.”

“This is something that the government must explain,” why it allowed “a police matter to include US participation,” he added.

The US Ambassador to the Philippines, Philip Goldberg, speaking on February 3 of this year, obligingly lectured the Philippines on what the laws and agreements they had concluded actually meant.

“I also think people should look and be very careful when they talk about the various legal and other issues involved because they’re complicated, they’re complex, they’re not simple,” he added.

The US ambassador cited as an example the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) between the Philippines and the US that shows what cooperation can do for both countries.

“My understanding, if you read the [VFA], it is a government to government agreement, it’s not between the militaries [of the US and the Philippines], that deals with treatment and conduct of our forces in each other countries and that’s what the essence of what the DFA [Department of Foreign Affairs] is all about, it doesn’t deal with the agenda of what our cooperation will be,” Goldberg said.

And:

“I think it is irresponsible to discuss those things publicly. They should be discussed for accountability sake in closed sessions of our Congresses, not just here, but in the United States,” Goldberg said.

…

“We have a process for doing that in the United States. I have testified as a U.S. official in private session, in secure areas in the United States Congress. And those are the kinds of things that we should do to both assure accountability and release publicly those areas of policy, and of law, but not of specifics that can only reveal the kind of cooperation that we have that help people whom with very much like to know that information.”

Beyond the obvious “shut up and stop laundering your dirty laundry in public” element, Goldberg is engaging in some ad hoc lawyering to declare that the Visiting Forces Agreement—which governs treatment of US military/contractor activities inside the Philippines—is not mil to mil, it’s gov to gov. So the US can work with Philippine government bureaus other than the military—like the PNP, and in areas other than external defense—like domestic security/counterterrorism.

Let us pause to consider Ambassador Goldberg.

He was expelled from Bolivia in 2008 on suspicion of regime change shenanigans against its president, Evo Morales. More significantly, previously he had served as Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, which, Wikipedia tells us, was originally the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services.

I, for one, was unaware that the US State Department had its own spook program or, for that matter, it had provided a haven to Wild Bill Donovan’s OSS when the CIA won that particular turf war. It’s now a big operation: 20+ offices, at least 300 staffers, and an undoubtedly hefty but classified budget. Anyway, Goldberg ran this thing. Now he’s in the Philippines.

Clearly, there are some ambassadorial postings that can’t be filled by a well-heeled campaign contributor tasked with throwing expensive parties and groping the spouses of the local businessfolk. Shaky spots like Syria (Robert Ford) and Ukraine (Geoffrey Pyatt) call for more of the “proconsul from the dark side” skill set to armtwist proxies and local political assets, deal with paramilitaries, manage US military and covert programs that stray across the bounds of legality, and deal with the execution and blowback from all sorts of wet work. The Philippines appears to be one of those places. So Goldberg’s there to handle the spook stuff.

And there’s a lot to be done in the Philippines. Americans tend to slot the Philippines into the plucky People Power democracy/bulwark against Chicom aggression slot. But the Philippines is also a rickety, insurgency-beset state that the US wants to see secured and stabilized as a vital base and locked in politically as a reliable pro-American ally for US power projection in East Asia.

The Philippines has been in and out of the US counterinsurgency meatgrinder more than Anbar Province, and that’s saying a lot. It started with the Aguinaldo insurgency against the US conquest in 1899-1902, paralleled with the Moro insurgency (fascinating little-know historical fact: the US government prevailed upon the Ottoman Empire to order Mindanao’s Sultan of Sulu to stand down from the Aguinaldo insurgency and he did!; but then the US doublecrossed the Moro and took them on the next year in one of the most brutal campaigns in US history, one that lasted more than a decade); then there was guerrilla warfare against the Japanese; then the Huk rebellion in the 1950s; now we’re back to the Moro on Mindanao.

Today, the U.S. is backing a peace process with the MILF, exercising its honest broker muscle to try to bring peace to Mindanao after an insurgency that has cost 100,000+ lives in the post World War II period alone. This involves US outreach to Malaysia to support the peace process, and even features US envoys clandestinely playing pattycake with the MILF. Though a priority for President Aquino, the MILF initiative provokes understandable ambivalence in nationalist quarters in Manila (and suspicion concerning the leverage Malaysia might have over President Aquino by funneling in money to support reconciliation) since Muslim Malaysia seems a better fit for Mindanao than Roman Catholic Philippines, and it’s thought that business opportunities and political influence in an autonomous, peaceful Mindanao might naturally flow toward Malaysia instead of Manila.

With this context, sending the SAF to barge into MILF territory unannounced and dooming the BBL peace process does not seem to have been some of Ambassador Goldberg’s best work. I am willing to speculate that one of the drivers of this process was the $5 million dollar bounty on Marwan offered under the State Department’s “Rewards for Justice” program, despite allegations that Marwan was a semi-retired second banana and perhaps not even a real bomb maker.

Apparently, as the AP report cited above indicates, Marwan’s outfit, Abu Sayyaf, was already considered to be flat on its ass in 2012 and not an operational threat. Both US and Philippine militaries want to focus their planning and budgeting on the bigger (and bigger money) and conventionally manageable China threat. Maybe that’s why the Marwan got turned over to the junior varsity: the PNP and the SAF.

The RFJ program is already blamed for skewing Philippine operations toward single-minded pursuit of rich bounties on “HVIs” (High Value Individuals) at the expense of more systematic counterterrorism ops. The SAF itself had contributed an additional 7 million pesos (about US$150,000) to the Marwan bounty pot, perhaps because US RFJ awards aren’t that easy to get and a locally-controlled bounty was perhaps seen as the best way to shake loose an informant. It looks like Marwan was way up on the PNP’s agenda. Oplan Exodus was the SAF’s 10^th attempt to nail him. Yes, tenth. And that doesn’t count the AFP bombing raid.

Was apprehension of Marwan pursued as a pretext/opportunity for nurturing sustained cooperation between the US and the PNP, perhaps with a nice payday/reward at the end? Was the assumption that the MILF would stand back and let the operation go on rather than endanger the peace process? The AFP, no friend of the SAF in this matter, released a photo of a relaxed Commander Napenas in civilian clothes smiling in his command center at the height of the crisis, with mocking captions sneering that he expected the operation to be a “walk in the park.”

Deeper in tinfoil hat territory, was the MILF expecting to shop Marwan at the appropriate time & decided to make the Philippine government pay an exceptionally bloody price for snatching him from under their noses? After all, the MILF would seem to have had ample opportunity to ascertain the true identity of the SAF intruders on January 25; but they kept picking them off for hours until almost no one survived. But the SAF did emerge with Marwan’s finger, which was forwarded to the FBI for DNA ID and possibly—kaching!—reward money. (The PNP, by the way, has subsequently declared it will not receive any reward money from the Marwan operation).

It’s not going to be easy to find out the backstory. The Mamasapano massacre appears to be seen mainly as a stick with which to beat President Aquino—and his anointed successor, Interior Minister Roxas—in the runup to the presidential elections. Senator Grace Poe, a well-regarded presidential candidate if she works out some legal difficulties, opened up a fresh set of hearings. But she neglected to table the commission report in the Senate prior to adjournment, which means it will be archived instead of released. Senator Enrile, the 92 year old lion of the Senate (and occasional prisoner based on ongoing corruption charges put forth by the Aquino administration) and fierce partisan of his own presidential candidate, current Vice President Jejomar Binay, promised bombshells at the hearing—but satisfied himself with collecting testimony that President Aquino might bear legal responsibility for the disaster.

Enrile did flay Ambassador Goldberg for telling the Philippines to stop blabbing about US mission creep, while hinting at the corrupting influence of the big rewards the US State Department throws around. He criticized the US for extending its security cooperation beyond the military to the PNP, but also implied the US would be welcome to dispatch its own soldiers to pursue targets in the Philippines:

“What is sensitive about the police operation? I ask the great ambassador of the US. (Why is) he saying enemies of the state may also be watching? We have the host country for him. Why does he talk as if this is the US?” Enrile said in a weekly forum at the Senate.

The minority leader, who called for the reopening of the Mamasapano investigation, said the US should first answer why they put up a US$5-million reward for the capture of Malaysian terrorist Zulkifli Bin Hir also known as “Marwan”…

“And why did they not use their elite troops instead of training these officers to become pawns and to be dead meats, to capture dead or alive a quarry of the US?” he said.

And the whole political exercise only took place just after the US-Philippine relationship had navigated a risky shoal. On January 12, 2016, the Philippine Supreme Court by a 10-4 vote confirmed that the “Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement” with the United States (signed on US behalf by Ambassador Goldberg) did not require any messy ratification by the Philippine Senate. The EDCA dodges some pretty categorical language in the Philippine constitution prohibiting permanent foreign military bases by permitting the Philippine government to give to the US military the right to operate free of charge “Agreed Locations” that can host “rotated” i.e. not permanent US military personnel and stock them with various logistical goodies but not nuclear weapons. Pretty much the only shoe left to drop is a formal return to Subic Bay, which already sees dozens of port calls from the US Navy each year. And I expect that may happen soon enough.

Apparently there was no interest, at least among Philippine elites, in exploring the awkward question of what happens when a bollixed US-advised military operations leads to a massacre of 44 Philippine security personnel, and thereby raising doubts about the merits of the EDCA.

And also zero public convo about any shortcomings of American attention, planning, and advice, or what they might imply for Filipino lives and interests as America’s best and brightest prepare to lead the Philippines into a prolonged struggle with the People’s Republic of China. Can’t undercut the pivot, doncha know.

It appears that after a twenty five-year hiatus, the US has successfully re-embedded itself in the Philippines: not only basing rights but deep penetration into the Philippine security, civilian, and political spheres, as well as military.

(Reprinted from China Matters by permission of author or representative)

• Category: Foreign Policy • Tags: Mamasapano, Marwan, Philippines

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